5 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 150.9 hrs on record (149.8 hrs at review time)
Posted: 17 Mar, 2024 @ 2:48am
Updated: 17 Mar, 2024 @ 2:52am

In my humble opinion, this game is the best of all worlds when it comes to soulslike combat. For starters, the game feel is so familiar it's almost freaky. If you've played a Fromsoft souls game, you know exactly (and I mean exactly) how it feels to move and attack in Lies of P. They also took tons of good features from different From games and implemented or remixed them in some way. We have rallying from bloodborne for blocked chip damage, the extra bag and stagger-based gameplay from Elden Ring, weapon arts from DS3, and parrying, perilous attacks, shinobi prostetics, and skills from Sekiro. They all mesh so naturally together that, although all of these mechanics are ones we've seen before, the novelty of having them all at once with little twists makes the game have a unique flavor.

Something insanely cool and unique that Lies of P does is it splits up all normal weapons into a handle and blade. The blade provides damage values, elements, crit rate, attack speed, upgrades, and a unique skill to the weapon, but the handle provides the moveset, scaling, and another unique skill. You can mix and match any handle with any blade to customize your weapon. Because the blade is the one that receives all your upgrades, you can finally experiment with other movesets without having to completely ditch all of your upgrade progress mid-game. There are so many fun combinations out there and you can spend tons of time looking for the best combination of skills, speed, moveset, and weight. Unfortunately, there are two caveats to this system. One is that every blade can be effective or ineffective at slash or stabbing moves. Because of this you can't put a wrench head (which is a slash blade) on a dagger (stab moveset) and stab someone for full damage. Also, boss weapons cannot be disassembled which I think is a big missed opportunity.

One of the craziest things to me about this game is that there are no bad bosses. Think of any souls game you have played. Now think of that boss. Now think of that other boss. Oh, and that other one. Although the genre is partly known for its bosses, almost half of the bosses in any given souls game are either bad or insanely forgettable. The closest boss in this regard would probably be Fuoco who just doesn't have much of an identity besides shooting some fire. The bosses are incredibly well designed and I had a blast fighting them all. However, this is as good a time as any to point out that this game is kinda abnormally hard.

You are expected, not suggested, to parry as much as you can since it inflicts stagger damage and aids in setting up a knock-down. The scrapped watchman will teach you this lesson very quickly. The thing is, the parry timing is more precise than Sekiro and spamming the button absolutely does not work here. Your parry frames are cut off as soon as you let go of the button. Because of this, the generally agreed upon strat for this game is to commit to a parry timing that you believe in by holding the button because taking chip damage is exponentially more advantageous than tanking a hit. Dodging is also a valid option at times, but the i-frames are lower than a typical souls game and you're not building stagger when doing it. It's more of a, "I can't quite figure out this parry timing," option than your main form of defense. I personally had a great time with this system as this is precisely what I find fun, but there are very few ways of playing the game on "easy mode" due to the lack of sorceries and online summons; you can only summon an NPC that I've heard doesn't usually live into the second phase of some bosses. Your only other option to get some easy damage in is to use throwable items which, especially the elemental ones, are actually very strong in this game but might not do all the heavy lifting. If you're the kind of guy who likes to play souls games "legit" (and you know what I mean by that) then this is absolutely the game for you. If not, but you're up for a challenge and are ready to make strategic use of the items you're given, then I think you can still have fun here.

One of the bad things about this game, however, is that the levels aren't exactly very hard. The difficulty curve from the stages to the bosses is pretty absurdly out of whack in my opinion. They're a fun time, sure, but it's just quite jarring. After trying Elden Ring again I was shocked by how dangerous quite a few normal enemies can be. The other bad thing about the levels is that the design doesn't always feel very inspired. I can sorta understand Neowiz taking this approach to generally design the game in a pretty safe way since this is a new genre for their studio and they were attempting to break into the mainstream, but I would like to see better from them in the coming DLC and sequel. The design also is very linear which is worth mentioning, but that's not really a strictly good or bad thing.

I'm bored of writing the review now but the game is sick and easily my GOTY despite some things I wish were a little different.
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