Jeffrey Tindall

It’s a game of great presentation, great ideas and terrible execution. The combat simply isn’t fun. Your only defensive options are hardening, which protects you from one blow, then has to recharge, a parry which works against some attacks but not others, and dodging, which grants a ridiculous number of i frames. Offensively your best attacks use a “resolve” meter which takes an insane amount of time to charge up. The controls also feel clunky and the animations are embarrassingly bad. Enemies spawn in out of thin air when you approach camp sites, and swords pass right through you when you’re dodging. The game also becomes way too easy toward the end when you unlock the best gear, shells and perks. In fact I struggled with the first two Mimi bosses far more than any other enemies and did not die at all after my first couple hours. I was excited for this game but it’s one of the worst souls likes out there. It nails the look of the Dark Souls games but totally misses on the feel.

The game is more concerned with being brilliant, epic, realistic and staggering in scope than it is with being fun. Fun is a concept for lesser games than this one. While the game is certainly impressive, I didn’t find it to be particularly enjoyable. Everything feels like a tedious slog. The missions are repetitive and uninspired. You have to ride your horse for so long in between destinations that the game gives you the option to put your horse on autopilot so you can go do something else for fifteen minutes (I found this concept so absurd that I laughed out loud when I first discovered it). There is a lot to like in terms of story and scenery, but spending over 100 hours riding a horse around and performing mundane tasks is not my thing. In the early 2000s I felt that games were getting worse because they were more concerned with realism than fun. I thought we were long past that. Apparently not,