Recent reviews by Eviley3

Just supporting a great project even though I can't draw for ♥♥♥♥. I would like to get into drawing maybe but I opened the software and I don't know what to do. Any suggestions to git gud?

Linear story with bad writing and uninspired quest design, 60% of the content in the game is busywork and fetch quest and Item farming/management. The main story is the weakest part of the game, the Sebastian and Poppy questlines are a notch above the main story, but still the writing drags it down a bit, especially the end of Sebastian's questline when you choose the Darker path.

The house you choose barely seems to matter, no matter which house you are you will be doing quests with a Slytherin duo, a Hufflepuff and a Gryffindor. There is no friction between people of different houses, and there are no stakes even though people die , somehow the buildup and the payoff isn't there.

The combat actually impressed me in the beginning, it started off fun but then soon got repetitive (played in Hard difficulty). The game throws numerous mobs at you with large health pools and you can whittle down their health faster with some tricks, so there is an attempt at some depth here but ultimately it still got boring. A better approach would be add more gravitas to the combat with dark wizards, maybe by making one on one duals more difficult encouraging strategic approaches like singling out enemies or using stealth (which shouldn't be too easy).

There are also so many immersion breaking things in the game, you cast the Unforgivable curses and nobody bats an eye, there is no consequences to being evil. There are actually very limited avenues to be evil. I tried to play as Tom Riddle Sr. but it was so immersion breaking when both the "options" are about the character being either being wholesome or just a mean good guy.

They could have made a system where the player could roleplay as a Dark Wizard who can freely do dark stuff but as they go beyond a point, they become vulnerable to dementors and cannot cast the Patronus charm, so they have to rely on villagers or others to defend them from the dementors. While a good guy wizard would struggle more with regular combat but would be fine against dementors. They could have also made the killing curse have a function, they could have made trolls pretty resistant to magic and actually a lot more imposing and unkillable with regular magic so that you have to either go the Dark Path and use the killing curse or use some other clever approach of obliviating them or something. Basically, overall more stakes in the combat would be nice, be it against a Wizard or a Troll or a dementor. Mobs of enemies thrown at the player isn't as fun.

The game doesn't have any dementors btw, atleast I didn't find even a sign of one.

I would recommend getting it on sale.

Pros:
Great soulslike with very good combat and level design, it was fun throughout. There are 5 weapon types, Longsword (katana), Large Axe, Spear, Dual Wield and One Handed sword (good for spell casting). One can caste spells regardless of weapon types but One Handed sword skill tree has buffs for spells.
I played a large part of the early-game without leveling up the Flasks on the Skill tree since I did not know. The left part of the skill tree is for heals and other miscellaneous stuff.

One can re-spec as many times as possible, just have to visit the checkpoint.

Longsword has parry possibility in it's skill tree but not every attack can be parried, loved the General Honglan fight cuz it scratched the Sekiro itch. I played 90% of the game with the Longsword (Swanblade) and 10% with the Axe.

The graphics are gorgeous, the world is so pretty and with varied ecosystems.

Cons:
The game is already in a good state gameplay-wise but some parts and systems feel rushed, they could have refined it and made it better with more time in development.
The performance was low, I played on Linux with a 7900XT on a 1080p 144Hz monitor and I had to settle for 60Hz at high settings.
Although I loved how interconnected the world is, and how rewarding exploration was, the amount of branching paths were sometimes too much, for me if this was toned down a little, i would have liked it even more.
The story was too cryptic and did not glean much from it, could have been more direct like Lies of P.

I got the bad ending inspite of trying not to, but I didn't care much for the story anyway, so that didn't ruin the experience for me. Another Downside is that once the story is over, you can't keep exploring, you do get a warning for it though.

Will be playing this game again sometime later.

Enjoyed the game for the most part, the level design is complex in a way such that exploration is fun. Started with a parry focused playthrough and it was challenging, switched to dodging and then it got too easy (got most bosses 1st or 2nd try) but I still enjoyed it. I will play again sometime later in Veteran mode with higher enemy density. Lore is interesting, story is okayish.

Suggestions for Lords of the Fallen 2:
- Make it possible to parry every attack (atleast give us a specific katana or shield or talisman or ring which can allow you to parry every attack)
- Make the weapon movesets more varied
- Don't make us jump through hoops to unlock special attacks of boss weapons, let each weapon have it's own special attack
- I basically missed all character questlines (killed Kukajin by mistake) in the game, so make most of them easily discoverable in a regular playthrough (because looking at guides and playing is not fun)
- after finishing an area, make the hint for the next place to go more conspicuous.
- of course more enemy variety which I think they already worked on judging by the trailer.

Had some performance issues on Linux (Endeavor OS) where the frame-rate dropped by a lot, but still no crashes and was able to play till the end without major issues.

I like difficult games as long as they are rewarding, this one is difficult but not rewarding. Games like Elden Ring have a tell for most attacks while some you need to memorize. And most attacks are such that you can react in time to dodge them.
In this game most attacks need to be memorized, very few you can intuit. So, you play it by repetition of losing, which I thought was the souls formula. After playing thisI realized that FromSoftware does more than that, they tweak their fights to be rewarding even while losing, that component was somehow missing here. I would say it's the most similar to (but a bit worse than) Dark Souls 2 which is not a bad game but AI Limit has a significantly worse story, sound design and voice acting.

I tried to like it and kept on playing 5 hours past the point it started being not fun.

What I liked:
1) Boss fights are fun (except for my criticism with respect to the attack's telegraph animation)
2) The connected-ness of the world was nice.
2) The parry mechanic was fun but the delay made it tedious to get used to
3) The Materialism Katana's parry was more fun than regular parrying
4) The number of items you find as loot while exploring was good unlike Stellar Blade where you lose track, but the problem was with cryptic names.

Some constructive criticism for the developers:
1) The animations don't have much weight so it feels janky, and the game tries to get away with using less animations to get the job done (critical hit has the same animation no matter the weapon). More animations with more details and weight would be nice.
2) Improve the telegraphs of attacks from enemies, its hard to predict when to parry without having lost 10 times even to the small mob enemies. This makes it such that there is sometimes barely any progression because a small enemy is killing you easily.
3) The sync rate system is a nice idea but in practice, it makes the fight non-linear such that either you lose in 10 seconds or you win very quickly when you have learned the moves of the boss which makes it feel not as rewarding as compared to other souls like.
4) It was often not clear where to go, this can be improved by better map design so that from the layout, its more obvious where to go next (don't put a quest marker or have the character say where to go, that would be worse)
5) The controls of switching between the red left arm's parry or shield could have been improved
6) The loot could have more explanatory names, every item has weird exotic names that I didn't get used to till the end.
7) All the mechanics where the enemies ambush and gank you was overdone, this can be tuned down.
8) The partial currency loss on death mechanic sucks, its better to do it the way Khazan did, where you gain some currency for trying again but you drop the currency for retrieval on death.

Fun linear co-op campaign with decent story and good world-building. Combat isn't that deep after getting used to souls-like combat, but still the gun mechanics are fun. If you enjoyed Half-Life 2, you will enjoy this immensely.

Played on Linux and had no issues via Steam's proton, worked out of the box.

Started this game expecting a souls like, was dissapointed a bit but I would still recommend this game. Played on Linux and it worked well but FPS was inconsistent.

PROS:
- Parry system is present and rewarding
- The boss gauntlet close to the end of the story mode is awesome
- The story is decent enough to pay attention to
- The lore of the world is interesting and in my opinion better than the story
- Overall, I liked many of the boss fights

CONS:
- Difficulty scaling is imperfect. Started off in Hard mode and it was too hard, then switched to Normal mode and it was too easy, an in-between difficulty mode would have been nice. And the difficulty is not the good kind of difficulty, the bosses are just way tankier and you have to use more of a Sekiro-like approach to defeat the enemies.
- Combat while good is not finely balanced like in souls games, more efforts into the systems could have made it much better
- The open world stuff and quest design is the weakest point, I was considering quitting the game once I reached the 2nd open region since it was getting so repetitive. This is the reason why I don't want to do a NewGame+ playthrough or get all the achievements (more novel boss fights thrown in the open world would have improved things).
- The movement animations and traversal including parkour can be quite janky at times, it seems like they put effort into the Jiggle physics instead of refining the movement of the character.
- Only 1 weapon type which you can flesh out with various skills/combos/special attacks
- The loot system is not rewarding since the rewards are poorly chosen. Most of the times you get crafting material or a blueprint for a nanosuit and this has far less depth and is far less rewarding than say getting a new weapon type (like say Eleanora's poleblade from Elden Ring). Another problem with the loot system is that you get numerous items and this makes you stop keeping track of them.
- The game doesn't let you explore at your own pace, it sometimes suggests where to go which I personally don't like. I prefer the souls formula. Also quest markers galore so you don't get attached to the world like you would in a FromSoft game.
- There are two entire "dungeons" where you use only the Drone ranged attack system, and both those dungeons had the same boss. This made it quite a chore and not rewarding.
- The writing is not good, the main character is quite robotic, other characters lack depth and are cookie cutter.
- You cannot keep exploring the world after finishing the main story.


If you are looking for soulslike after playing FromSoft games I would recommend "Lies of P" and "First Berserker Khazan" over this. Overall I would give the game a 6.5/10.

FromSoftware are barely putting effort into Nightreign in general and this DLC specifically and it shows. The base game is basically unchanged, there seem to so little that is different if you did not buy the DLC. It's like a very tiny team works on it while most of the developers work on Duskbloods or some other IP.
They are not listening to community feedback and even in cases they do, they react half a year or more later. It's like they launch the game and they Forsake it (aptly named, this one).

I like the new content, but it's not upto the standards I have begun to expect from FromSoftware. My complaint isn't only that it's an asset flip with a few extra things, its that even that asset flip can be done with better balance and quality.

The new shifting earth would have been great to explore in Elden Ring base game or Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, but the design is just bad given that there is a time crunch. (i am liking it more as I am getting more used to it but the rest of the Criticism stands).

Difficulty level is not balanced in my opinion, the bosses have quite a lot of health in Expert difficulty but the small mobs are well balanced. I dropped the difficulty to Normal and now I find that the normal enemies are way too easy and the bosses are of less damage sponges but its easy again. An in between difficulty between Normal and Expert would have been nice. Having high difficulty without massive health pools would have been a better approach.

The gameplay is great, but the level design is lacking compared to FromSoft games. It somehow does not pull you in like some of those games, you have to decide to play it. The game lacks the immersion of say Elden Ring.

Having only 3 weapon types is quite limiting, would have loved to have atleast a few more, like maybe 6 (two per scaling type). The armor and weapon upgrade system is also quite odd, if I have been using a weapon + armor set from level 50 and I want to level it up to level 100, I have sacrifice other higher level weapons several times to get my level 50 weapon to level 100. This is tedius, an easier system would have been better.

A more detailed tutorial showing you the Training section and how to try out combos would have been nicer. The game is mostly about chaining combos and weapon skills you unlock together, I did not figure this out for the first 5-10 hours of the game.

Overall I would recommend it, but I would recommend Lies of P over this game. Hope they make a sequel with improvements and hopefully co-op built in.

Great game to play on Co-op, especially with friends. Have finished it only on Tenderfoot difficulty so far, and the Roots level is not balanced on Tenderfoot. The final level Kiln was easier than Roots. It needs balancing.

Otherwise the game is great, will continue playing at higher difficulties.

Some issues:
- No Save feature, this is my main gripe, it makes you commit more than 1.5 hours if you are a beginner
- grabbing the Vine or the Rope launcher sometimes makes you stuck
- A revived friend right before the Kiln level did not have the campfire lighting up, then we ended up with me being able to go to the Kiln but a fog wall blocking the friend (disconnecting and reconnecting by him fixed the issue)