Recent reviews by HekiReki

Game of the year 2024. Wukong, FF7R, SH2, Astro Bot are all great, but this is fantastic. I'm not good at writing reviews, but I'll give a quick rundown:

Very long game, you'll get 100+ hours fairly easily. I'm still not done with it and I'll play NG+.
Amazing turn based combat, I haven't played a turn based game this good since my childhood, FFX back in 2001.
Stunning graphics and art style.
Beautiful music, some of the best I've ever heard.
Gripping story, I haven't been this invested in a story in a long time. Really well written.
Top notch character design, I haven't met a single character I disliked, that's very rare in games, and there's a lot of characters you'll meet.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Highly recommend it.

This game is amazing. It had a rough start and I avoided it for over a year until they released a major patch fixing a lot of issues but I kept my eye on it the whole time. The game apparently only has 3 developers. If they had a bigger team and more resources they would be rivalling the likes of From Software/Elden Ring. Not that they need to, this is a gem in itself. I haven't even completed the game yet but the world is stunning, I haven't felt this immersed in a world since Dark Souls 1 and it feels similar to that, it has a really bleak dark mysterious feeling to it.

Really fun dramatic weapons, combat feels great, the level design is amazing, bosses and enemies are well designed. Can't believe only 3 people made this. It is better than some AAA games I've played.

Sadly I can't recommend the game, encountered too many game breaking bugs and the game is very short for the price, it cost £40 and I got around 10-15 hours out of it, even though the devs said "40+ hours". My listed play time isn't accurate, as mentioned the real play time somewhere around 10-15 hours. Hard to tell as I kept the game open when AFK a lot. In game save file says 15 hours but I was AFK for that a lot as well. Bad habit I have with games.

Some of the game breaking bugs: Ladders disappearing, making progress impossible. Enemies just standing there completely unresponsive. Being unable to talk to NPCs. Boss health bars disappearing, UI elements disappearing.

Positives:
Combat is mostly fun. The parrying mechanic felt nice and responsive, the world is really nice, the lore is great, nice boss variety. Good music, though limited. Nice UI. There's some good ideas like the masks, but it isn't implemented properly.
The game has a lot of potential and in march might be great. The devs did do a good job overall.

Negatives:
The game does not explain things well, weapon rarity, unique elements systems, etc.
Normal enemies are weak and boring to fight. I never died to a normal enemy.
The game focuses on mask loadouts and switching between different mask/weapon combinations, but I found myself never switching, there's no reason to... It's slow and clunky and just gets you killed in combat.
Game has the worst enemy variety of a soulslike I've played. You sometimes fight the exact same bosses multiple times, there's one boss you fight 5 times and another 3 times...
Heavy weapons are basically useless because there's no poise, you'll never get slow weapon attacks off since every attack stuns you.
Physical builds are very weak compared to element builds and battlemage builds are straight up broken.
Tried many different weapons, the movesets are lacking, clunky and boring. No reason to use heavy attacks, it costs far more stamina and does minimal more damage than light, and is much slower.
Most of the weapons and most of the abilities in the game are useless, and there's a lot of copies, like 4 of the same ability just with a different element.

Final note: They released the game like this, at this price, but it's far from finished and they even released a road map and the game will be in a finished state in March, which if I knew I wouldn't have bought until then.

Amazing game. Takes a lot of inspiration from Slay the Spire but does its own thing too. Has a ton of replayability, great story, music, combat, lore, build variety, stunning art. Pick it up, you won't regret it.

You actually did it Capcom...You added Enigma protector. Bye, won't be touching your games again until its removed. World will be next. Good way to ruin the hype of the new Monster Hunter. Clowns.

Great game overall, it has come a long way from the first game. It had a lot of issues at launch and still has some but the developers have been fast to patch things. It's not as difficult as a Souls game, but it's still a challenging and fun game. I hope there's a DLC or another game in future.

One thing this game and most Soulslike have done wrong though is making the best and most fun weapons/armor/spells available so late in the game that you won't get much time to use them. NG+ is a bit messy currently, not much point doing it, coop is buggy, pvp is fun but clunky, so again, not much chance to use the best equipment.

I thought I'd play this before the new one releases. That was a mistake. Felt like I was immersed in a tumble dryer the entire screen shakes every time I do anything and it cannot be disabled. Game seems pretty damn good outside of that screen shake though but sadly I can't play with that much screen shake it's nauseating and I'm resistant to that kind of thing usually.

Game of the year 2023. I'd even go as far as saying it's the best game in a decade. Larian Studios are the best game developers out there right now. Swen, their director, really knows what he's doing. I've played 115 hours so far and I've only scratched the surface of this masterpiece. No MTX, no preorder bonuses, no internet required to play. Performance is great, lots of quality of life options and customisation, controls are how they should be. They even released patches quickly to fix the few issues the game had and added even more QOL. They just do everything right.

Fun game. Recommend it. Is it as good as some of the original Star Wars games like KOTOR? No. But it has an amazing story with a good combat system and Star Wars fans will love it. Even if you play on the lowest difficulty just for the story it would be worth it. It's not very hard on the hardest difficulty though, I'd say 6/10 in difficulty, it makes it more fun and rewarding for people like me that love Souls-likes and challenging games.

Has a few negatives though. Forces you to use the awful EA app. Has performance issues with FPS drops and stutters occasionally. Map is terrible. Can't change controller camera speed.

Refunded. Game itself looks amazing but i'm not paying £60 to beta test your game, it released in a very poor state especially for a AAA game. I waited a month for fixes, they never came. Crashing and performance issues even after 5 patches. 55 FPS on a 3080 at 1440p is embarrassingly bad, it can be pushed to 90 with constant drops if I enable FSR but FSR is ugly. DLSS should have been added. Game is running at 50% resolution with FSR off by default, you can force it to 100% to improve visuals but your frames will drop by at least half. I went from 90 to 40 by doing this. Also can't really change controller layout from default due to some of them being modifiers, just doesn't work. E.g. if I wanted r1 to be attack like Souls games.