Recent reviews by JC 042

Looks and sounds amazing, story seemed okay, but wow the gameplay was awful.

Parry mechanics that were both unsatisfying and flawed, especially when enemy attacks hit you before their swings animations connect and when you would expect to attempt to parry. Enemy attack wind ups varying from 3-5 business days to next second delivery were incredibly annoying.

Of the 15 weapons I got then attempted to mix and match, none were enjoyable to use. Legion arms might have made it more interesting but their limited allowed use ruined any opportunity of that.

7 / 10

I wanted to commit more deicide.

Each individual part of the game is great; the combat, the art, the voice acting, story, environmental design.

But the way it all ties together is terrible in a way I can't explain other than comparing it to the second half of Final Fantasy 15, where the sum total of all these great things was mashed together as quickly as possible in a way that disappoints. Like an art gallery with amazing pieces but the gallery itself is a shed.

Edit after finishing thinking over each art piece in the shed gallery:
- 3D modellers and probably the concept artists: Amazing job, superb work.
- Environment artists: Perfect score, everything looks amazing.
- Combat game designers: Almost perfect, just some slight critiques on only a few enemy designs and how they telegraph their attacks or lack of variety in them.
- Story writers: Like the story, but I think the way it was told fell short, like half the story and side stories and dialogue in each chapter was missing, and I wasn't able to get interested or invested in it by the end despite trying to experience everything.
- Level/game designers: not too bad but the world itself feels mashed together in a way that is neither believable or interesting and had me losing interest and engagement in a way that reminds me of the second half of Final Fantasy 15.
- Audio design: Mixed bag of nice use of sounds but the mixing between the different sounds during combat and also dialogue often threw me out of immersion a lot.
- Programming: A couple of crashes and rare instances of frame drops from certain boss attacks but honestly not too bad.
- Voice acting: honestly the MC voice actress did amazing and carried it.
- Animation: Loved it, the kind of stuff I wish I saw in Doom.
- Boss design: Of the 4 the first 3 were amazing, although easy enough to beat all 3 on my first try, but for the first 2 that's entirely down to how the general enemies in each area are perfect training guides for that chapter's boss fight, master them and you've already mastered the boss fight. With the 4th only being easy after maxing upgrades on everything before going into it. With the final boss being the only one to kill me once and being not bad but disappointing in comparison to how good the first 4 were.

Honestly I wished the game had more boss fights considering that will be the one thing I know I will remember enjoying the most about this game, even if I only fought most of them once.

Although I'm not a game designer to understand or explain why everything felt so un-engaging and lacking in immersion, I reckon if it was done well it would have been an amazing game people who loved the God Of War reboot series would be recommending given the similarities in combat and semi linear / open world setting.

Great game, interesting story, and I love the mystery of it all which made me want to hack all the email terminals before the final reveals.

Wouldn't say it's worth £22, would recommend waiting for a sale of at least a 50% off.

Exactly what I was hoping it would be like and more.

Story and characters and mysterious lore is far more improved compared to the first game.

Combat is A LOT more varied and challenging than the first game where the limited move set now makes me realise how simple the bosses were compared to Silksong.

Platforming was so well done and challenging I now think the Path of Pain was Hornet's routine commute.

Music is still on point, looking forward to a lot more in the DLCs.

I really hope we get another Pantheon DLC equivalent here, I desperately want to replay a lot of the bosses repeatedly.

Like house flipper but for castles with an optional combat minigame attached to it for some reason.

Simple and enjoyable.

Yes

I want to remember a time before I finished this game and binge-watched all the fan animations by arainydancer/Atelier and as a result cemented this game into my thoughts for every waking and unconscious moment for the past 3 months.

10/10, would feel sad for a robot woman looking for her wife again.

Very good for what's there, however after you beat it there isn't much replay value.

It very much needed Workshop support so people could make and share interesting and iconic ship designs to disassemble.

Also I would have loved to see the ability to disassemble monolithic sized ships, but its understandable there would have been huge performance issues involved in such a feature.

Hosts can teamkill then kick you even at the end of a mission leaving you with nothing, and there's no mechanism against it like Deep Rock Galactic which blocks the host from doing this.

Game will crash frequently, including on the ending mission cutscene, and there's no way to rejoin a lobby.

Lots of bugs to do with damage registration/values and spawn rates that make certain missions impossible.