My original thought was to take a break from Soulsborne games before diving into
Demon’s Souls. Yet, I also figured it’d be a good time to try playing this, given that it copies a lot of mechanics from those games. The controller layout and flow of combat are very similar, albeit with a handful of changes that take getting used to (ideally...you can also spend most of the game pressing the magic button when you mean to run, like I did
). Similarly, the equipment and upgrade systems copy/paste a lot, but do simplify things or add a new twist here and there.
Note how the HP/Stamina meters are at the bottom of the screen.Some of the game flow is also copied - there are checkpoint crystals akin to bonfires, and there are lot of shortcuts to open up.
Other than creating the inevitable comparisons, it’s not a bad strategy, just like plenty of fighting games back in the day keyed off of what
Street Fighter II did.
That said, folks looking for more
Dark Souls here...will be largely disappointed. Most of the other aspects of that series, like the atmosphere and lore-heavy storytelling, are not present. The main plot is fairly generic, starting with the main character, Harkyn, who pretty much looks like Kratos doing a cameo in
Warcraft. You can pick between three classes, but that’s it. To its credit, there are multiple ways to handle some of the quests that pop up, some of which are highlighted in the ending narration.
Overall though, it’s pretty generic stuff, set in what amounts to a couple of fortresses, with a handful of characters. Not a lot of variety. To be fair though, it’s also probably more of a “mid tier” game, not one made with a AAA budget.
The only woman - or female anything, offhand - in the game.It does seem to have a reputation as a buggy game, and I did run into a few annoyances. The primary one is that the game would lose application focus (or something) leading it to immediately pause (no online aspect, so unlike
Dark Souls, you can actually pause). I could use Task Manager to regain it, but it was mildly annoying. I did get stuck in the floor once, and jump to places I couldn’t get back out of some other times - though that’s more a design oversight.
One of the later bosses, which was actually two bosses, glitched out for me too, leading to one of them freezing and doing nothing. I’ve seen a speedrun of this where several bosses could be glitched like that reliably, but I think that was fixed.
In any case, I didn’t get any hard crashes, and little impeded progress.
Overall, not bad, but also not something that I’d say is a must-play.
