Recent reviews by logophobia

It's just kind-of meh. The graphics are great, but that's about it. It can be entertaining for a few hours, but there are far far better titles out there.

Positives:
* The graphics and mood are rather magical
* Some ok-ish story twists

Negatives:
* The combat is just not fun. Way way too many flying enemies. Bosses that are not difficult, just uninspired, annoying and boring.
* Movement and combat is clunky. There's some sort of bouncy-back effect when you hit an enemy. It's just not fluid enough. I didn't have issues with pogo-ing like some people reported, but it's still not any good.
* The voice-acting is amateurish and doesn't fit
* Desperately needs a map
* Even on hard difficulty, it's rather easy.

It feels like a title that could've used a lot more play-testing. With a bit of tuning it could've been amazing. Frustrating and amateurish. I'd only recommend it with a hefty discount if you've finished all the more interesting titles on your list. There's just too much good stuff out there to waste time on titles like this.

It's.. ok. It excels with its connected environments. One of the best level-designs I've seen in souls-likes. Properly difficult if you enable right options. Bit of a maze sometimes, but you get hints (maps). If you like discovery, amazing graphics and difficult pve, well, this is the game for it. The combat is decent, but not great.

It does have some big negatives though:
* Lacking enemy variety
* Bosses are mostly uninspired and easy, with a couple of exceptions. Too many gimick bosses.
* Quests can actually be good story wise, but again too obscure and some point-of-no-returns you can easily miss. No need to copy the crappy quest design that fromsoft has.

It's good. Very connected world. Some fun minor quests. Bosses are decent, sometimes a little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with fake-out timings, but doable overall. Bit of a mix between zelda, hyperlight drifter and a souls-like.

I'm a bit mixed on this one. On one hand, I love the artstyle, the story, the naration. It's just very.. redwall. I don't mind the repeating quests and the backtracking. The main problem here is the combat system. I've played a lot of souls games. When you get killed, it's usually "fair". Here that's not quite the case:

* The knockback attacks can be very ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. No windup, they knock you back, and then hit you multiple times when you're down. You need to know when a boss can do knockback, and avoid those situations entirely. The final bosses second phase is especially ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in phase 2.
* The hitboxes can be quite inconsistent
* Some attacks are just very hard/impossible to block if you're badly positioned
* The lack of i-framing does hurt here

To beat some bosses, you have to "play" their AI. Invite certain attacks, position yourself so other attack types are rarer. This is just.. tedious. This might be coloured by me playing on the highest difficulty. Everything is beatable, sometimes it just takes a long time. I suspect higher difficulty levels just magnify the issues the combat system has.

The game is fun. The expansion bosses feel fairer. I hope they fix the issues in part 2.

Performance was doable until about 12 hours in when I got to the forest array with "koboh dust" (lots of particles). I'm not going to finish that area when I'm getting 3 fps with a 3080ti and a 7700X. Was hoping the patches helped.. but no.

Edit: fixed with mods, but damn, game is pretty good, but the devs don't deserve your money if they're fine releasing it in this state :/

It's a pretty decent successor of the original, more of the same, but doesn't exceed the quality of blasphemous 1.

Pros:

* Great, creepy, graphics
* Fun combat system, all three weapons are fun to play
* Great music
* Fun side-quests

Negatives:
* The bosses are on the easy side
* The dungeons (with some exceptions) are a bit easy
* Story is a bit .. predictable
* Some bugs so far:
- It doesn't handle my 4k resolution monitor very well with default settings. Menu's and buttons that went over the screen's edge. Not very well tested. Had to fiddle a lot with the settings until something works.
-Mapping buttons to the mouse doesn't work. So now I have to fiddle with their awkward default keyboard controls.

Buy the first one first, if you want more, only then buy part 2

Bit of mixed bag. The only reasons you should buy this game are if you enjoy:

* A well-crafted souls/sekiro-like fighting system
* Good bossfights

That's it. This is no bloodborne, no sekiro:

* The story telling is rather generic and simple. It tries to be bloodborne, but it isn't
* The game is small
* Enemy variaty is rather low
* Some of the levels are rather confusing, very maze-like. Everything looks the same, easy to get lost, lots of backtracking needed. Level-design is not great.
* Bit on the easy side for a souls-like
* Graphics are ok, but not great

In the end this was a bit meh. The combat is amazing, the bosses great (but not a lot of them), but otherwise.. meh. Buy on a discount, it's not worth 25 euros.

Flawed, but pretty good. Buy on a discount.

The good:

* Awesome story, though things can drag on a bit. Bit overdramatic/cliche sometimes. Some bits are a bit eh, like the orphanage thing where they take babies hostage, wasn't a big fan of the ending either. The companions shine though, feels a bit like the classic bioware companions, except without any choice.
* Simple but fun combat system

The bad:
* Grindy, bit too long sometimes, tons of boring fights. Could've been better if some parts were cut.
* The companion AI is counterproductive, and needs a lot of micro-management. They keep walking into environment effects, and keep retargeting.
* The save system is a bit inflexible, sometimes you have quite a few difficult fights without autosave
* The graphics are decent enough, but not particularly outstanding. Same with the music.
* The mask menu didn't work for me, never showed any masks.

Over-promised, under-delivered, but I still had a ton of fun with this.

The problems this game has are obvious. It is a buggy mess, the physics engine is a mess, driving feels like the road is made of butter, the skill/upgrade system is a mess (same as witcher 3 in a sense), and the fighting could be a whole lot better. Gun-play was decent enough, but melee/swords were incredibly clunky and boring. Everything was poorly balanced. Bossfights were a bit boring even on the highest difficulty.

Still.. the story it tells is amazing, it has memorable characters, fun quests. None of the quests reach the depth of some of the witcher's quests, but they still were a lot of fun and thought-provoking. I would've liked to see a bit more moral depth/choice to some of the quests (doesn't reach the witcher 3's heights), still, they tell a story worth telling. The combat and stealth can be fun, but they're also a little clunky and limited at time. Night city does feel alive, very pretty to look at, and has a ton of things to do.

Got a feeling CD Project Red spread itself too thin here. Tons of small quests that don't amount to anything, that are fully voiced, have custom text, etc. Large amount of clothing items, fully modeled, that people will skip because the armor rating is lower. Loot that feels completely useless and auto-generated, except the weapon models are finger-lickingly good. So many random fully voiced conversations npcs are having throughout night city. It feels like they put tremendous amounts of work in stuff that in the end doesn't really matter instead of focusing on the quests and the gameplay.

If you like cinematic amazing quests and a good story, play this game. If you want GTA, then probably best skip this one.

I really enjoyed this one. Not perfect, but pretty damn good with the new update.

* Good art
* Pretty decently sized game
* Sharp gameplay
* Nice story, good voice-acting. Multiple endings!
* Fun bosses

But:
* The bosses can be a bit clunky and badly balanced in heroic mode
* Some balance issues

Don't know what it was before the update, but right now it's a ton of fun.