Don't need a guide

Lies of peak

This review was written at what i assume is around the halfway mark, I don't know if I'll find the motivation to finish the game.

TLDR, it's a badly thought out amalgamation of what FromSoftware has done before, and none of it really works well, together or in isolation. I do not care for the story, but that may be due to my general lack of enjoyment of the game. There is no rhythm to the combat, and it feels worse than playing Elden Ring with the Deflect Tear and Malenias Great Rune which themselves are fairly shallow implementations of better mechanics from Sekiro and Bloodborne, respectively. The level design is as linear as it gets and quite uninspired (other than copying FromSoftware without adding anything new) with few outliers.


Visually, the game is well made but quite monotone. That is about all i have to say.

The monotony of the visuals is also reflected in the enemy variety, which the developers attempt to mitigate by putting even more of the same enemy everywhere and pumping up their HP pools to annoying levels. I found myself running past many areas where i would normally kill every enemy until i find the next checkpoint because i simply could not be bothered.

This issue is made even worse by the frankly awful combat in this game. Enemies, as many of them are puppets, though that doesn't stop human enemies from doing the same, are incredibly snappy giving you barely any telegraph other than that an attack is coming some time in the next 5 seconds. This makes for an amazingly bad pair with the poorly thought out high risk low reward perfect guard system so you end up just throwing everything you have at them until they fall over or you die. The perfect guard has little reward other than a tiny amount of stagger damage (which doesn't actually stagger the boss and give you a window, instead you have to activate it with a charged heavy attack which due to a lack of hyperarmor across the board is sometimes almost impossible to pull off in time), and the high risk of taking damage you cant even heal back with the game's thoughtless clone of bloodborne's rally system, because you can only heal back damage that you block. However, if you guard late, you will get hit without blocking, meaning no heals, and if you get hit late, more often than not because you only tap the button if you intend to perfect guard, you also end up getting hit without a way to heal back because you stopped blocking already. The unblockable and undodgeable attacks also for some reason require you to perfect guard them, which i imagine is what everyone is doing already anyway, so why make a special indicator for it. Speaking of which, the dodge is made to be extremely bad to shift focus onto the terrible perfect guarding system.

The legion arm and fable arts also aren't implemented particularly well. Fable arts for the most part are just free damage you can click when they are full, however because they charge quite slowly and the charge for some reason is not recharged on death or resting by default BUT carries over after death as long as you collect the currency you lost, you mostly never end up using them because you're saving them for later/the next try because you won't kill the boss on this attempt anyway (there are PLENTY of "fakeout" second boss health bars, and all of them are incredibly predictable because the damage you deal to the usually quite bloated health bars is suspiciously high). The legion arm exists and I barely ever use it, so I have nothing to say about it other than it being another thoughtless copy of what FromSoftware did in Sekiro, and even there the prosthetic arm and combat arts were with a few exceptions not that well integrated into the game's very tight core combat.

The one positive innovation i want to point out is the heal regain mechanic where you will charge up your healing item if it is completely empty by dealing damage makes every situation technically recoverable as long as you play perfectly, which does feel great when you do actually pull it off.

I am not engaged whatsoever in the story, which may or may not be caused by my general dislike of the game, I do not know. There is no decision making involved, you can play the game by just walking the only path that exists and killing whatever stands in your way. NPC side quests have so far been, without fail, fetch quests that make you backtrack a short distance for some inconsequential reward.

The level design could not be more linear and uninspired, except the places where the "inspiration" from early FromSoftware titles is palpable, being enemy spam, ambushes and cheap traps. There is an entire area that might as well have been copy pasted from Sen's Fortress, but the rest of the game has no shortage of breaking floorboards, swinging chandeliers, corner jumpscares and gank squads either.

Oh, and for some reason they have a generic sidekick with obvious hints, exposition and marvel tier jokes who barely ever talks and has the personality of a rock, making the few times he does talk even more jarring though i am certainly not complaining about the frequency. I haven't the slightest idea why they felt the need to include this.