Recent reviews by Spiegel

I have played 30 hours of the game to its conclusion and tried to do as much of the side quests as I could. Here's what I think.

This is a bad game. The only reason I played it to completion was because this game is so frustrating, janky and overall broken that I refused to let it beat me.

To begin, hitboxes in this game make absolutely no sense. There are times where you attack a target at the same time they attack you, only to see your attack go through their model and "miss" while theirs connects successfully. There are other times when you should be invincible while dodging (I-frames) yet the game ignores this and hits you anyway.

Second, are the weapons. Many of the weapons have a string of attacks depending on how many times you hit the attack button, standard fare. The issue comes with many weapons having a longer string of attacks than expected. For example, the game's "heavy weapon" known as "single rigged" weapons have an incredibly long wind up and take quite a bit of stamina. You are locked in this very long (for a souls-like game) animation which leaves you wide open for characters of equal attack speed to hit you. If you press the attack button once more after your first attack you are now locked into a follow up 2 hit combo that you cannot cancel. This has killed me more than it has helped me.

If the issue was only present for the single rigged weapons, it would be fine. However, I also tried what the game considers the "dual daggers" of the game, or "twin rigged" weapons. They hit fast but they do not hit hard. In order to be effective, multiple hits in the same chain are required. However, this also locks you into many combo animations and since these weapons have very little stagger power, the enemy can just power through the hits and hit you...hard.

This isn't the end, however. You, the player, are also gimped from the start and right through most of the game. There were many times where I had a powerful weapon that landed a 3 hit combo only to realize I've only taken a fourth of the target's health. On the other hand, even the fast hitting/low damage enemies were two, three-shotting my character.

This is made far worse by the targetting system this game has. There is no "free targeting" as the auto-target system immediately locks on when you first attack an enemy. This gets worse if there is more than one target. On top of that, the camera, when locking on breaks itself should the target sidestep past you, dodge or move quickly.

Then, there's the bosses. Good lord this is the part I believe was never playtested. The difficulty of each successive boss vastly shifts. First boss, P.A.X is actually a good way to test your skills as it challenges you based on everything you've learned up to that point. Second boss, however, Firebug is more frustrating than fun due to its incoherent, random AI and hitbox (as explained before).

Third boss, Big Sister is a giant assembly plant that gets easy once you realize you need to un-target each limb on each phase, everytime you attack. That way, you can see what's around you without the camera having a seizure. The fourth boss, The Black Cerberus is just a dude. Nothing hard about it, nothing interesting about it, it is the Wood Man of The Surge. And finally, the fifth and final boss (that's right, only five) Rogue Process. The boss has two phases. The first one is punishingly difficult while the second one is a joke. The difficulty shifts between bosses is so large it makes a terrible experience.

And lastly, there are the quests. I was not able to finish one of them due to a bug in the game which did not drop the item from a mob that I needed to complete it. I spent a good amount of time resetting the game, killing the speicific mob, even making sure I was doing it right by checking forums and youtube videos of the quest. Another quest had me bringing an drug to another NPC which, later, was supposed to activate an event but never did.

To sum up. Don't buy this game. Deck13 had a great idea that is horribly executed. Their second attempt at a "souls-like" game is better than their first, Lords Of The Fallen. Sadly, this feels like two steps forward, one step back. Maybe in the future, their next attempt will be a fair, and enjoyable one. And if you need another reason, not to get it. This game is so bad, it compelled me to write my second review on Steam, ever.