Played 3 hours and it's another soulslike. Same gameplay loop, stats, souls, bonfires, etc. All called something different of course. That's not meant to be a knock it's still a system that I enjoy and am interested in playing.
Combat, As I said is going to feel very familiar if you've played any souls games but does skew a bit toward Sekiro with the reliance on parries to break posture. Parries though felt a little awkward and I didn't figure out a way to do a sneak attack from behind so I'm not sure if it's possible. Worst part of combat IMO was the lock on camera. It's a fine OTS view when walking around but when you lock on it drops down more towards your butt. I found myself needing to reposition the camera so I could look around the side of my character, so he didn't block my view.
Exploration- Seemed to be a bit of verticality and they have portals you touch that will reveal hidden bridges for a short time that allows you to reach areas not previously reachable. Some of the portals lock you into an area and you need to kill all the enemies to get out. Kind of like Lords of the Fallen but on a much, much smaller scale. Otherwise, though it's pretty linear at least in the demo.
Character progression- This is where most of the changes can be found. You get 3 load outs that you can outfit with set amounts of weapons, items, skills, magic etc. Skills are bought with souls from a skill tree then you equip (I think it was up to 8 in the demo) them to your loadout. There's a decent amount of options here that would take much more time than I have now to go over all of it.
Overall, it seems like a decent effort for their first soulslike and it's just a demo. I plan on playing through the rest of the demo and I'm sure I'll pick it up on release unless something unforeseen changes my mind.
Combat, As I said is going to feel very familiar if you've played any souls games but does skew a bit toward Sekiro with the reliance on parries to break posture. Parries though felt a little awkward and I didn't figure out a way to do a sneak attack from behind so I'm not sure if it's possible. Worst part of combat IMO was the lock on camera. It's a fine OTS view when walking around but when you lock on it drops down more towards your butt. I found myself needing to reposition the camera so I could look around the side of my character, so he didn't block my view.
Exploration- Seemed to be a bit of verticality and they have portals you touch that will reveal hidden bridges for a short time that allows you to reach areas not previously reachable. Some of the portals lock you into an area and you need to kill all the enemies to get out. Kind of like Lords of the Fallen but on a much, much smaller scale. Otherwise, though it's pretty linear at least in the demo.
Character progression- This is where most of the changes can be found. You get 3 load outs that you can outfit with set amounts of weapons, items, skills, magic etc. Skills are bought with souls from a skill tree then you equip (I think it was up to 8 in the demo) them to your loadout. There's a decent amount of options here that would take much more time than I have now to go over all of it.
Overall, it seems like a decent effort for their first soulslike and it's just a demo. I plan on playing through the rest of the demo and I'm sure I'll pick it up on release unless something unforeseen changes my mind.
SSIGuy
An Islander Returned
It's nice to see studios doing this... I am not a Souls fan and would never have taken a chance on bothering to buy the game (even with Steam's refund option). But I will try the demo... and who knows, maybe I'll like the game and buy it (as I have played one or two Souls games that were 'ok' for me).
I've put 6 hours into it since last night, and I'm really surprised how solid it is considering this developers previous games were just casual mobile stuff.
The visuals and animations hold up against recent AAA soulslikes, and the combat is pretty tight. If the enemy design was better, I would have said it's almost on par with FromSoft. The music is good too. Some pieces remind me of TW3.
I really liked the city. I'm in the monastery now though, and I don't like this area nearly as much.
Farflame
SasqWatch
I wonder if the combat is actually more dynamic? They claimed in the video here that you dont need to wait when enemy ends his attack pattern.
No merry drinking with a friendly monk in dormitory?
Well, you don't necessarily need to wait in any soulslike. You can always attack as long as you're not staggered.
I like how parrying is a little more forgiving in Enotria compared to other soulslikes I've played. I usually just give up on trying to parry and rely entirely on blocking and dodging, but I actually use it here.
No, these particular monks are assholes.No merry drinking with a friendly monk in dormitory?
Farflame
SasqWatch
Yes, but I assume that they meant mainly bosses. Like that you dont need to be so carefull when fighting bosses and avoiding their set of attacks. Well, maybe their statement was too bold.
The boss I fought in the demo could one-shot me with certain attacks, so yeah, you still have to be on your toes at all times.
So as much praise as I gave the city area of the Demo, I have to give the mausoleum area equal disdain. The Design of the area is actually pretty solid, but the balancing is way off imo. The jump in difficulty is absurd. I managed to get through the area but it was more tedious than challenging and upon facing the final boss, Forget about it. Despite fighting it several times for several minutes and hitting it quite often I wasn't able to get it down past even a 10th of it's health bar. I was only doing about 100 damage with standard attacks and the amount off it's health bar was barely noticeable. I would have tried some elemental attacks, but I didn't want to grind levels to meet the requirements.
Just to make sure it wasn't just me sucking at the game I checked some forums and youtube and found many others shared my sentiments. One youtuber was having the same luck I was with the final boss but he discovered a glitch in which you could reload an earlier boss and it would not fight you and you could just kill it for 8,000 XP. he finally was able to beat the final boss but not until he maxed out his weapons and skills and leveled to level 55. For reference when I got to the final boss I didn't have any max weapons or skills and was level 28.
Other things I didn't like were,
Hit tracking- unless you dodged at the very last second the enemies weapon would track and hit you even doing up to a full 180 to hit you.
Homing missile spells- some spells will follow you around, even if you run in circles. I did find out later you could parry or attack the spells to dispel them. still not a fan though.
Lack of moveset and weapon variety- Might just be because it's a demo but only swords, Colossal swords and maces that all attacked very similarly except for speed.
Speaking of speed colossal weapons were way too slow as were jumping attacks and sprint attacks imo.
Anyway, balancing and mechanics can be fixed by release so I'm not going to totally sour on this one, Afterall all my positives above still stand. I'll need to see some changes though for me to pay full price for it.
Just to make sure it wasn't just me sucking at the game I checked some forums and youtube and found many others shared my sentiments. One youtuber was having the same luck I was with the final boss but he discovered a glitch in which you could reload an earlier boss and it would not fight you and you could just kill it for 8,000 XP. he finally was able to beat the final boss but not until he maxed out his weapons and skills and leveled to level 55. For reference when I got to the final boss I didn't have any max weapons or skills and was level 28.
Other things I didn't like were,
Hit tracking- unless you dodged at the very last second the enemies weapon would track and hit you even doing up to a full 180 to hit you.
Homing missile spells- some spells will follow you around, even if you run in circles. I did find out later you could parry or attack the spells to dispel them. still not a fan though.
Lack of moveset and weapon variety- Might just be because it's a demo but only swords, Colossal swords and maces that all attacked very similarly except for speed.
Speaking of speed colossal weapons were way too slow as were jumping attacks and sprint attacks imo.
Anyway, balancing and mechanics can be fixed by release so I'm not going to totally sour on this one, Afterall all my positives above still stand. I'll need to see some changes though for me to pay full price for it.
I couldn't even get past the starting area; there was no indication of what I was supposed to do except killing the same person over and over again and my mouse sensitivity at even 10% was still jerking all over the place so as to be virtually unplayable. I quit in total frustration!!
