Recent reviews by strabes

could have been great but has several fatal flaws that make it more frustrating than fun:
1) combat is clunky. Reminds me of DS2, but with a sekiro-like parry mechanic except with tighter timing and you still receive elemental status buildup when parrying
2) rock-paper-scissors-like mechanic of 4 different elemental statuses with 4 names, with four *different* names for the 4 types of elemental damage. It's very complex and dumped on the player within the first hour of play. I am 25 hours into the game and still haven't quite figured out which elemental damage type causes which status effect, how to keep track of what special perk in which slot does which type of elemental damage, etc.
3) extremely complex character builds/loadouts with little to no explanation of what everything does, and using mostly italian music words to describe what they do like allegro, forte, piano, etc. There are so many different slots for perks to apply different elemental damage types to the 4 special moves, but they don't correspond to the top, left, bottom, right order of the rock paper scissors mechanic mentioned above so you just have to remember that a perk you put in one of your slots makes special ability 2 do poison damage for example, but that's only on one of your 3 loadouts and could be totally different on one of your other loadouts. When you face an enemy that does one type of damage you can't even pause the game to check your loadout to see which special ability you put in which slot to do which kind of italian word damage type to counter it. It's maddening.
4) so many enemies that one shot you. Good soulslikes achieve difficulty with tough but fair enemy design, not just putting an enemy that can easily 1shot you before a campfire, creating a loop of get 1shot, long run back avoiding tons of enemies, get 1shot, etc.