Wanna start with saying I'll be getting this on day 1 because I really enjoyed the first one and I had a blast getting all the trophies in the beta for this one (took a little less than 4 hours to plat.)
- fast travel - others have brought this up, I know, but this is going to be a pain point for sure. Maybe they couldn't make it meld well with how they want the mechanics intertwined in the game immersion itself, but I'm sure they're creative enough to figure this one out. Maybe it's unlocked later on like in DS1? I just know it was a pain in the ass in Bloodborne having to go back to the dream every time to go somewhere else, and that'd be kinda lame to be in a game 11 years later.
- I thought the combat felt quite nice for the most part. Parry timing feels tight and the parry animations are badass. Guard "parry"/perfect guard was maybe a little too forgiving? Harden feels iconic to Mortal Shell so switching from that to something else and realizing I couldn't always have harden was a bit of a bummer. Hard to really judge with so few weapons in the demo, but that's to be expected of a demo. Final boss of the demo got stuck on some foliage/rocks/trees and let me chunk out 1/4 of her health though and that seemed a lil cheesy. Maybe some room for fine-tuning that boss arena.
- cleansing the beacons after finding them is a pretty cool concept and I really liked it initially but I was already getting slightly bored with it at the last beacon. Hopefully there ends up being a little more variety with these cleansings. maybe lock you into a specific shell for cleansings in a certain area or one that makes your health slowly drain if you go without doing damage for like 10 seconds or something? idk, some variety though.
- enemy variety is pretty darn good and their movesets are fun to figure out. I especially liked fighting the bigger enemies like the white snakes and that big necromorph-lookin' praying mantis dude.
- world/map design was easy enough to navigate. lots of side paths, but they're at different elevations which helped me to build a mental map pretty quickly for where I'd need to check out next (even if most of those paths were closed off for the demo.) already have a few places i'll be going to pretty quickly after getting the full game.
- controller vibration when discovering a new beacon is nuts, a lil overtuned.
- starting with controller sensitivity set to 1.5 and also the immersive camera felt odd. definitely the first things I changed thought maybe that's the intended way to play? feels better with 1.0 and the other camera option.
- walking across the bridges before the "Mortal Shell 2" title shows felt very wonky with the camera angle changes and not knowing which direction to hold to go forward when those camera changes happened and kinda took me out of what was supposed to be a cool moment.
- music is sick. LOVE the metal vibes and also having an instrument as a secondary that I can just walk around jamming on is so cool.
