Recent reviews by PomaReign

Git Gud.

Truly Game of The Year.

This is an excellent game. Don't let it simplistic indie look fool you, this is one of the gems in the wide mountain of indie games. If you ever want to feel like your part of a Star Trek TV show, this is it. Add to that with great ship building customization and tech upgrade tree which doesn't get too daunting and always feel like things are well tuned so it doesn't feel easy but you're not dragged down by micro management.

Hope to see more of this franchise in the future with more money behind it to give it voice acting and maybe in a fully rendered 3D universe. The story, lore, and characters are great and feels truly Trek.

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Game needs alot of work before I recommend this to others. Basically the developers seem to have over emphasized art style and visual quality and not put more effort into game design and mechanics. While there are technical and performance issues, these can be addressed in future patches, personally I dont have any issues here, the major game designs decisions that the developers made early on will pigeon hole this game where they can't make major corrections. One of them is that they decided to go with an isometric view while incorporating alot of platforming mechanics, on top of which they designed the game around the use of a controller which is very imprecise, this leads to alot of scenarios where you instantly died because you narrowly missed your jump or accidentally stepped over the edge by a couple pixels. Very frustrating and not fun, compounded by the fact that you have to run all the way back and redo the whole thing again which can be 10 to 15 minutes of wasted time. Respawn points are far apart to make this tedious, unlike games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring which gives you respawn points near areas you're likely to die from, its obvious in this game that the designers did very little playtesting when they put together the map and play spaces.

Combat can be fun but because they decided to this in isometric view, you don't have the ability to read your enemies moves up close, instead you have to deal with a camera that dynamically zooms in and out so sometimes you don't get to read the animation. Sometimes the animation isn't very clear what move an enemy will do especially in isometric view, it gets obscured depending which way they're facing. In Soulslike, you don't have this problem because you have control over your camera and the animations are very clear and readable up close. Dodging in this game feels very slow compare to other games and the parry timing doesn't seem consistent - one of the problems I notice was the hit boxes in this game is rather terrible which maybe why parry doesnt seem consistent. There are many instances where you can see the enemy weapon doesn't touch you yet it registers as a hit, this messes with trying to learn parry timings. If they can't fix hitboxes then they need to relax the parry windows. It does seem they've only playtested the game around sword and board gameplay, but not developed for other playstyles much. Being a ranger is not class fantasy you can play as well even though you can get bows. Range and Magic combat in this game is weird where it forces you to melee to built up points to use your range and magic abilities. This game would be much better if they flesh out other class arch types so players have more choices and power.

They incorporated some elements of survival games but the mechanics are tedious and annoying, you can't get schematics for basic things you need like chests immediately, instead these have to be found. You can buy chests off vendor but it feels like a waste of money when you already have the materials and tools but just need the schematics. The game also gates your housing til about mid game behind a very long quest so you're forced to dump all your materials into a limit number of slots between the city's community chest and your inventory.

I get they're looking to move to something new but their idea of new so far has been to add more tediousness that feels like chores instead of fun challenges. These tediousness means wasting the players time instead of enriching it.

Currently I don't recommend playing this til the fix the bugs and stability issue. Half the time you can't finish a mission because the bugs cause problems with progress or you get disconnected and wasted half an hour on a mission. You do the mission again and are likely to waste your time because of more problems. It's fun for awhile but if you want to pour alot of hours into the end game, you'll deal with alot of frustration.

This game is promoted as a co-op game but the co-op experience is half baked from lack of multiplayer features such as multiplayer chat and direct IP connection to dedicated server to no individual quest tracking and progression. Multiplayer stability and connectivity issues are constantly a problem. Another game that was badly designed by a European studio. These features are basic and present in most early access co-op games.

Overall Rating: 7/10
Not sure if the studio thoroughly playtested the game, whoever playtested and provide them feedback clearly wasn't sufficient. It's like the game make things more difficult for the same of being difficult without being fun and rewarding, just annoying. Would be an 8 or 9 out of 10 if they didn't include the annoying elements into the design.

Graphics: 10, some of the technically most amazing and modern game graphics if you got the hardware for it.

Art Style: 10, very beautiful world with great grim dark gothic art style that permeates the worlds visuals.

Music, Sound, Voice Acting: 6, some of very poor voice acting that makes you cringe, does not fit the dark medieval fantasy. Music is rather mediocre. Sound sometimes bugs out in combat, otherwise passing but not satisfying, the sound cues can be hit or miss.

Animation: 7, NPCs lipsynching dialogue and body expressions don't match what they're doing or saying. Sometimes grievous strikes looks janky and buggy.

Combat: 6, ok but frustrating combat, generally feel like you're not fully in control of your character. It feels like your character is just gliding everywhere with your attacks and dodge rolls. Blocking, parrying, and dodging feels good with its timing and mechanics however. Everything else needs work. There's no real back stab mechanic, you can't out maneuver your opponents and do a critical strike on their back side. Their version of a back stab is more of an ambush where an enemy isn't aware of you. Being a pure spellcaster isn't viable as other builds due to mana efficiency of spells and the low amount of mana you get per stat point.

Level Design: 2, worse part of the game is the level design and encounter design. Its like it took the most memable parts of dark souls games and uses it ad nauseum. You get sick of it a few hours into the game that it becomes an annoying expectation rather than interesting encounter. The majority of locations is set up somewhere high where they have enemy types that will snipe you from far away that can target you but you can't target them until you get much closer looking to knock you off the edge. It's interest the first few times but after dozens of times like this, it's tiring. Then there's also the dozen of times where there are mobs that are hiding somewhere looking to knock you off the ledge as you pass by. These wouldn't be so bad if the game gave you tools to effectively deal with these but it doesn't, they push you off even with block and dodging will more likely send you over the edge. Instead it seems to be expected that you've died and come back and prepare to try to juke them. Then there are the encounters on ledges where you get overwhelmed by enemies who crowds you off, again you have no tools to handle these. Most of these encounter and level design problems occur in the early game which will turn many people off. On top of that, the jumping! The jumping in this game is one of the worse jumping I've seen in any game, not only do you have to deal with everything I just mentioned, you have to deal with how bad the jumping is, you have little control over how far or short you jump and most of the jumping 'puzzles' in this game requires you to be on point on where you jump to barely land on the edge of your destinations, exceptionally bad design. As part of the level design, there are two realms. The umbral realm is interesting and is used to solve puzzles but it gets staled fast because its the same look through out the game and the same experience, it becomes more of annoying chore that wears out it welcome. Used very excessively and not a fun feature to constantly deal with. The studio needs to learn good level design and encounter designs, they seem to conflate annoying and frustrating design with difficult but fun design.

Multiplayer: Due to technical issues, multiplayer wasn't functional most of the time.

Other: Camera controls and lock on are frustrating and frequently gets in the way of combat. Excessive use of NPC merchants doubling as quest NPCs who move to other locations which you then have to figure out where, given how few vestiges there are in the game, it can be annoying time wasting hunt that provides no entertainment or satisfaction. Players shouldn't have to guess where a merchant is when they just need to go back buy a few items. Elden Ring did this way better. Speaking of Vestiges, another interesting feature but badly implemented in the game. You can create your own 'bonfire' with seeds, there are specific locations that sprinkled through the map that you can plan them but you can only have 1 at a time. This wouldn't be so bad except you generally only have one main vestige and the game pushes you to use the seeds while exploring. The seeds aren't plentiful nor are they cheap so you can't use them frequently. It's another example of the designers making the game more difficult for the sake of making more difficult but not making the difficulty more fun, just annoying. If they make a sequel or a new game, its suggested they go with new game designers that understand what makese soulslike fun.

If you like Bloodborne and or Sekiro, you'll like Lies of P.
Graphics: 8 - Technically not state of the art but works well
Art: 10 - Visually well done. The monsters, bosses, characters and setting is exceptionally designed well.
Music: 8 - Music is good, most of the boss battle tracks are good, some of the background music for locale is purely atmospheric and sufficient for its purpose. The additional music tracks you pick up and play at the hotel have some fantastic songs, it's a shame they don't use those tracks to elevate some of the in-game experience such as heightening some moments in the story or particular battles.
Voice Acting: 8 - Some voice acting is sufficient and good quality, a few are sorta bad but a few are also exceptional. Sophia and Gepetto felt as if it was awkwardly trying to go for something but fell short, while characters like Simon, Venigni, and Arlecchino were superbly voice acted.
Combat 9 - Solid combat, everything feels weighty and impactful. The perfect block system can be kinda janky, but it has more to do with memorizing particular animations from your enemies and the timing of your perfect block. The animations don't read intuitively for you to time you block based on reflexes, many times the attack animation juke your read by obscuring it or changing up the speed or hiding it to look like another attack. Dodging is not as important in this game compare to other Soulsborne style games, the combat is designed for you to mainly block and use dodge as a supplement. The game has a stagger system similar to Sekiro where you build up the enemy stagger from attacking and perfect blocking, this is a satisfying element to Lies of P combat system, you are rewarded for your skillful executions.
Story- 8 : Surprisingly the story is rather coherent for a soulborne style game. You have a good deal of dialogue with characters and can talk about subjects that cover the background of a subject matter so you get a decent understanding of what's going on. Sometimes things don't line up properly, like characters will talk about things you haven't to introduce yet in the story as if you missed a story trigger but the characters act as if you did trigger a part in the game's story.