Recent reviews by Green

I waited until I had 100% completed the game and earned every achievement before leaving my review because I wanted it to have some weight behind it, but from the first hour to the last I just didn't have fun with this game. If I had purchased it myself I would've quickly refunded it and played something else however it was gifted to me by a good friend so I had to see it through to the end.

There's potential for a really good game here but that potential is overshadowed by so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that it made playing the game feel like a chore. From the first act you could tell what kind of game this would be and it didn't really improve on any fronts as the game continued on. Each area is riddled with invisible walls, some even in areas you'd expect to just jump over to access another path you can walk around to in less than 5 seconds. Some areas look like pathways you could potentially take, only to be stopped meters before even reaching a real obstacle leaving your character awkwardly running in place against nothing, when there's a perfectly good cliff face you can't pass right there which can be used as a realistic blockade.

It doesn't feel like there's any consistency in enemy strengths either with some large enemies going down in seconds, while a guy holding a stick with a mushroom for a head deals half your health in a single hit and will be your toughest fight between the last boss and the next. On the topic of bosses, the earlier parts of the game felt like a boss rush to me which isn't always a bad thing, however I found myself wanting to explore the areas as much as I could before continuing only to be met with invisible walls or dead ends everywhere I went, as I was being forced to continue on the train tracks this game lays out for you through each of the early levels. You go from the most obvious boss arena you've seen, to a short ~5 minute linear section with nothing to offer, back into another giant boss room. When I play games like this I enjoy stumbling around and not knowing where to go, only to have no flasks left as you mistakenly enter a room housing a boss fight that you weren't expecting. This improved quite a lot in the later game though which I appreciated.

Another gripe I had with this game was the cutscenes and how they were handled. Most of them can be skipped, which is nice if you've played through the area before while some just can't be. Or then you'll have a cutscene you skip into a ~30 second long animation you can't skip. Or my favorite of all, the unskippable cutscene into a long unskippable animation which you have to sit through every single time. I was at my wits end during the final boss fight where without spoiling much, has an interaction that can happen multiple times per fight, which can't be skipped, and lasts what feels like 20+ seconds each time. It takes you out of the game and wastes way too much time.

The boss and enemy fights themselves, god I didn't like most of them. The designs are REALLY nice however fighting them wasn't fun at all. The combat system in this game is really fun and there is a lot you can do with it but when you're fighting a boss (or enemy in a lot of cases) you find yourself just light attack spamming because your attacks don't really cause them to stagger, and if you time a spell poorly and get hit for even the tiniest bit of damage it all just gets canceled. You're hitting this enemy, which sometimes is smaller than your character, with a giant stick over and over again and it tanks everything, yet its tiny arrow, or punch will cause you to stagger and be unable to attack, heal or even dodge in most cases. The boss fights had a lot of spectacle to them which was nice to see but damn it got tiring seeing what felt like every boss have the exact same instant across room gap closer that is very hard to react to, or a phase where they just sit in the sky spamming attacks, or run around the arena for 30 seconds with you dodging their charges. That isn't fun game design to me. My favorite yet though, the final boss of act 2. You're in an open arena (as always) and it's surrounded by a cliff side you can't climb over HOWEVER way before even hitting the cliffs there are invisible walls stopping your movement. I found myself countless times bumping into those walls, getting slowed down and then killed by the boss. Or the boss jumping out of the invisible wall and being able to attack and hit me through it while I was unable to do anything besides walking away to try and get the boss back into the playable area. Then there's attack hitboxes. For the most part they were fine but so many times did my point blank heavy attack just not connect, or the bosses swing would hit me while I was standing directly behind it outside of any danger. There was one very late game boss which I won't spoil that requires doing so much side content to fight which has a really cool fight, design and location however it's ruined for me by a single mechanic which is its shield bar. You barely do any damage to the boss until you deplete a second bar above its health which can be pretty tricky to do. Once that bar is gone you get around 30 seconds to get as much damage as you can in until it charges up again which, fine, other games do right? Well in this case if you deplete the bar at certain points of the bosses max HP % then the bar will just immediately fill up again as it phase switches. I didn't like that one bit and it felt like bad unfair game design. Oh and right after this fight there is a second boss fight you're forced into, though I first tried it so I'm pretty sure it's more of a gimmick that you can't lose. But it could've been quicker because I was there for almost 20 minutes just spamming attacks on enemies that didn't really fight back much.

The later game level design looks and plays really nice though. I loved the pagoda realm and the entire snow act. The following lava themed levels looked stunning too. But the final act was so different in such a bad way that I don't understand why they structured it like that. The final act is where you finally gain access to flying around on Wukong's cloud (I'll get to the cloud in a bit). It's a large open area with no use at all besides flying around killing bosses, which are all very obvious to spot due to their large unnaturally open and flat spaces in this mountainous area. There's no sense of wonder exploring this area because everything up until this point has screamed at you to not bother looking around each corner you find, or searching for a hidden dungeon of some sort. Now onto the cloud. I'm not sure how everyone else's experience was with it but it was honestly very fun to use. Being able to get a top down view of the game was a different perspective and with how great the game looks there were moments where I'd pause and just enjoy the view. The only downsides to me were that for some reason the cloud would tank my FPS by over half. I'd go from ~90FPS all the way down to the low 40's/high 30's. I was also disappointed that I could only use the cloud in this area, but I guess the other levels aren't really structured to support it though I wish there was a faster way of getting around because going through the same paths over and over again as slow as the character moves is very tiring.

Onto the performance now, which is pretty bad. I'm using a computer that can run pretty much everything I throw at it on mostly maxed out graphics settings, at 1080p hitting framerates above 100fps. This game required me playing on lower tier graphics options WITH frame generation on which I never use due to the graphical issues it can cause, while struggling to maintain a consistant above 60FPS. There were areas that I would hit around 90 for the most part which was fine enough but going from 90, to 60, to 40, to 80 all in the span of a few minutes is very jarring. For a linear game with not much in terms of playable space it runs horribly.

What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ phenomenal expansion. Well worth the 2 year wait. Thank you Fromsoft!

Editing post completion: My opinions haven't changed and have instead grown stronger. The story, characters, boss fights, new weapon classes and enemies are all incredibly well put together. Then there's the map. I've never had more fun exploring a games world before, not even in the base game. Not knowing how to get my last two map fragments only to find the smallest little cave entrance or hidden door which leads to a grand reveal of the area was such a nice feeling. Can't wait for what's in store next.

Damn. This was actually better than I thought it'd be.

If you levioso the cats and then spam them with basic attacks you can send them across the room.

It's great.

Very great!

Pissed off a rock and it destroyed my house. 10/10

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worth every cent of the 2.50 i paid for it.

edit: still worth every cent of the 2.50 i paid for it.

edit 2: jesus, it's still worth every single cent i paid for it with.