Honestly it is an okay game. The satire and story are funny and it it nice to see references to a lot of different games. I like how leveling the luck stat adds a fun addition to the combat. I can see what they were going for but I think after playing the whole game and the DLC it just missed the mark a bit. I wanted this game to be better than it ended up being. I feel like I really gave it a chance but it just was not executed well. The combat can leave a lot to be desired and I think a lot of the enemies miss the mark on scaling. There is a lot of janky combat (purposeful or not) that can make combat not enjoyable. Exploration is cool but it is very very difficult to make your way around when the game wants you to backtrack through three areas with minimal shortcuts or hard to navigate areas. I love souls games and souls-likes so I do not mean the game itself is too difficult. I actually think the bosses for the most part are kinda easy, at least in the second half on the game I found them almost more trivial than a group of enemies. Especially in the DLC it felt like normal enemies did way too much damage and you can get stun locked a bit while fighting them. In contrast the bosses in the last half of the game and DLC were very very easy and not really interesting. The game has positives but I find the negatives outweigh them. I bought this on sale with the DLC and I am glad I did because I would have felt kinda frustrated if I paid full price for it. If you like souls-likes this is one of them...but there are much better options out there. If you have played them all then give this a shot but if not look elsewhere. I know this sounds like a harsh review and to be fair there are worse games in the souls-like category. I know a lot of people enjoyed the game and I enjoyed it at many parts as well. I just can not recommend someone spend their time or money on it over many better options on steam.

I like the art style presentation. The world is suffering from pixelation, so there are detailed 3D enemies and locations mixed with basic 2D sprites that affect backgrounds and characters. It makes a unique blend; I found it flowed well and gives the game its own identity.

The game is meant to be humorous, and humor will range from person to person if it lands. Part of the joke is that much of the equipment in the game is similar to other intellectual video game properties you may recognize. The narrator doesn’t like the player, constantly riffing on them. While I think it’s a little too talky, it never stops the gameplay to tell its jokes, as it has the dialogue run in the background, which I appreciate, as many games will force you to wait and listen.

The combat is incredibly similar to the first Dark Souls if you’re familiar, but it has more input delay. The best way I can describe it is that weapon swings are slower, and the animations are more stiff and strict compared to Dark Souls. While the dodge roll feels less responsive when pressing the input key, it does give generous invincibility frames compared to its animation. It requires getting used to, so it can feel unresponsive if you need to react quickly, but you will learn with enough time in the game. Every weapon has a light and heavy attack, and there are multiple weapon types with their own attacks, which add variety to the combat, though many of the attack animations are similar. Worth noting, the large weapons are often too slow to be realistically usable, as their damage does not compensate for how long it takes to swing given how fast some enemies are.

Build variety is worth mentioning, as I feel there are a few viable paths the player can invest in. Strength and Dexterity affect what melee weapons they can equip, as well as these weapons scaling with these attributes. Additionally, there is Source, which acts as a requirement for additional spells the player can learn and use. Spells use Access, which is gained from fallen enemies, and drops frequently enough that the player can viably use magic in most combat encounters. Lastly, Luck is a stat that gives the player perks based on certain stat thresholds. For example, with 5 Luck, the player can now perform Critical Hits; at 18 Luck, a player has a chance to get +25% damage for 30 seconds upon attacking.

The enemy variety consists mostly of fighting humanoid enemies with different visuals. The enemies use different weapons and abilities, which do help encounters feel varied. Normal enemy health pools take 2-3 hits, and elites usually take 4-7, so encounters are generally pretty fast-paced. Enemy placement is generally well thought out, though group encounters can be infuriating as enemy attacks can get out of sync with each other and wallop the player. This makes a few sections more frustrating than they should be, and it does get more prevalent toward the end of the game. Groups are made additionally more frustrating due to the fact that the enemy lock-on is very bad about targeting the threats needed. This can also be problematic when a ranged enemy is attacking the player and the player simply cannot lock onto the enemy due to how far away they are.

I think the bosses are mostly disappointing. Some boss encounters have the player fighting multiple opponents in the arena, where I generally prefer one-on-one fights, as the lock-on system is bad in this game, and it’s easy for multiple enemies to get out of sync with their attacks and kill the player due to unlucky positioning. Player attacks don’t always land on secondary targets. Some fights offer a companion to accompany the player for those who are struggling. More importantly, the bosses don’t feel particularly unique. All of them are large humanoid creatures with high health pools and mostly generic attacks to memorize. The execution doesn’t make them feel too different from regular combat encounters. One boss named Wunderschoenburg I think was a good boss with varied attacks, with a much higher difficulty but a relatively long run back to fight if the player dies, which I think will irk some players. Mercucio was also a more engaging fight than its peers, and I wish more bosses were similar to these two.

The world is connected through elevators and NPC staging areas (with motivational signs for the NPCs), which will excite players who enjoy exploring an interconnected world. It adds a layer of cohesion to the world. It’s neat when a pathway opens up and leads you to a previous checkpoint. That said, in actuality, there are few ways forward and many backward, so navigating can be frustrating unless a player is able to memorize specific landmarks. The world design is probably the game’s best feature, though it comes with drawbacks that all interconnected worlds have, in that some areas can feel stretched to connect to each other. The locations traveled are all visually varied; the player will travel to a village, a manor, snowy mountaintops, a forest, and more. There is no map and incredibly limited fast travel, which also makes it a pain to upgrade equipment, as the player may have the materials but isn’t near an anvil, so they have to backtrack.

The game features a Remember mechanic, which affects equipment’s stats and abilities. When a piece of equipment is taken to a specific map spot, it can be Remembered, and it unlocks better stats for the item, sometimes gains an ability, and becomes physically more detailed. I think the idea is cool; I don’t know that I like its execution. Effectively, it makes you continually look into your inventory to see if an item is ready to be Remembered, taking you out of the gameplay and into menus. I think having a popup message about "An Item is Quivering" or something of the like would help alleviate my issue with this, or just have items automatically Remember to keep you in the game. If this game ever gets a sequel (or an update if you’re reading, developers!), I would love to see this as a feature in the future.

The game’s engine is Unity, which also gave me very minor issues with an occasional random frame drop and one game crash. Enemies sometimes move too close to the player and their character models merge, and neither enemy nor player can hit each other until the player moves out, which happened a fair bit. Anyone who is a completionist should know, the game will require multiple playthroughs and there are missables.

Overall, I think The Last Hero of Nostalgaia is worth trying, especially if you enjoy Soulslike games and a humorous take on the genre.