It genuinely deserves some sort of award. The devs just did not give a single fuck.
The Steam discussions, the subreddit, their posts on social media, it's so clear they're just kind of phoning it in and shipping it out to try and make what sales they can.
There's a post on Steam from TWO YEARS ago asking if there'll be more weapon types at some point, the devs responded something along the lines of "Yes! We're still in early access but there'll be more weapons coming soon!" And now at release it's still just a measly three weapon classes.
Here's some things just off the top of my head:
- The lock-on mechanic, there'll be an enemy right in front of you attacking, but you'll somehow lock on to an enemy half a mile away on a rooftop not even in combat and if you try and try to retarget, the last enemy you'll finally lock onto is the one you're actually trying to hit, and by that time you're already dead.
- The stealth is awful, and the game is designed around it, and there are purposefully overpowered enemies everywhere that I suppose you're supposed to sneak around? But the stealth is broken.
- The platforming, it just doesn't work.
- There's no 'new' indicator in the equipment screen, so after exploring and finding a ton of stuff, you just have to guess what's new and what's old.
- And then the inventory menus and stats of gear itself is just awful, weapons with low damage stats are better in combat, weapons with much higher damage seem to do worse, it's nonsensical
- Awful camera design, the camera angle is so low that when you're locked on to an enemy you're facing your own back and can't see half the enemy's moves, God forbid if you're using bigger, slower weapons, and doing finishers that fling the enemy around.
- Level design and enemy placement is terrible, it doesn't feel like a soulslike, it feels more like the design of a character mascot game from the PS2 era, or a stealth game but without proper stealth mechanics. And every enemy is either so easy that it's boring or randomly super hard and just placed to be an annoying blockade, and there's snipers everywhere, like why are we forcing so much stealth?
Not to mention just how mechanically broken the game is, every single time I launch it my settings change, why is the game changing its own settings?
Anyway, I could go on but I thought I'd give my two cents and hopefully deter others from wasting their money. Maybe it's just right for someone but it's not for me.