Lies of Pizza~ :3

This is a game that constantly shoots itself in the foot. An experience that does manage to do some things very well but falls so short in other aspects that, in spite of it's merits, manages to leave behind an inconsistent, unusual and sometimes bad aftertaste. Nevertheless, this game is worth playing - especially if you enjoy fast paced combat revolving around parries.



SPOILER WARNING FOR BASE GAME AND DLC



This game looks great, at first glance. They managed to translate the artstyle into the game well. Although rare, there are even moments of beautiful vistas. But at the same time, there is something that feels off when looking at the game. When I started playing, I thought it looked good but something always felt off. At first I couldn't quite piece together what was making me feel this way so I spent some time just looking around the city of Krat. The architecture ended up being my issue. When you look closely at buildings in this game, you'll notice a lot of placements that don't make any sense. Windows that look into or are cut off by walls, fences that don't seem to serve any purpose, unusual lack of symmetry in the buildings design... Often times, things end up looking "put together". It's as if they ran out of time and had to design the models for these buildings in a hurry so they couldn't afford to pay attention to details. It would make sense for that to be the case but this issue is still present in the DLC so I think it really is a genuine lack of attention to detail. While a misplaced window might not sound like much, this sort of thing has a strong presence throughout the whole game and it unfortunately hurts the presentation a lot.
From a gameplay standpoint, the level design is great. It's very simple - you can find everything on your first playthrough, something I found to be very refreshing. Every level is full of shortcuts that will seamlessly connect with the places the player has already explored, each time leaving the player with a sense of neatness.

What I just described with the level design is symbolic of how many other aspects of this game are. The characters & story might be fine and interesting but it's presented to you with very hit or miss, generally mediocre voice acting and terrible dialogue that makes it extremely difficult to care about. Gemini is the most jarring example of this and I'd go as far as him being the one of the primary reasons why this games story is hard to care about. His dialogue is extremely generic, annoying and you can't escape him since he plays a seemingly pivotal role as the companion through your journey. He goes beyond just being an example of bad dialogue and voice acting, he's a bad design choice. Even if his dialogue and voice acting was good, the idea of a companion that essentially is only there to tell you how you're supposed to feel after a certain event happens is terrible. To give an example, take the fight after Simon Manus. You take the elevator down after learning just a little bit more about one of the main antagonists of the game after a very climactic fight. The elevator takes you all the way down to the basement of the massive tower you just climbed in order to take Manus down so it is naturally a very long way down. You are left alone heading down to what is potentially the end of your playthrough and are left alone with your thoughts about what had just transpired. A moment to take everything in after the largest scale fight yet. That is, until Gemini breaks the silence. He talks about how terrifying it is for a human to try and become a god and how no matter what happens you and him are stuck together. In other words, he gives a very surface level thought about what just happened and the motivations of Manus in the form of terribly written dialogue. This sort of thing is present throughout the whole game. Something unexpected happens - "Whoa?! What was that?!"" You venture into something dangerous - "Hmm... Make sure to be careful pal!"" I'm paraphrasing but that is the gist of what Gemini does throughout this game. He isn't the companion the game wants you to think he is, he's a narrative tool designed to shove the "intended" feeling of events during the game down your throat, killing your desire to try and interpret, to try and find your own feelings about what just happened.

The combat is the best thing this game has to offer. Very satisfying, great sound design and you're for the most part fighting a fair fight. In some aspects, they nailed it. Weapon upgrades and assembly is also well done in this game, giving you an excess of both "generic" and "special" weapon upgrades so you don't have to limit yourself and worry about only being able to upgrade one or two weapons during a playthrough. The added depth with the ability to disassemble generic weapons and combine them with other handles is a fun system to experiment and engage with. You're also inclined to do it since once you try to match weaknesses like puppets being weak to blunt and electric you'll quickly notice just how big of a difference it makes. The game in that way encourages you to try and assemble a weapon that will match weaknesses - courtesy of the blade and fit your playstyle - courtesy of the handle. Unfortunately, like everything else in this game, there's some glaring issues with the combat. The camera is not very good. At times, when you fight hordes of enemies you can find yourself in a situation in which you parry everything that is coming at you from 2 or 3 different enemies but then are pushed back from those parries into a corner, leaving you in a situation in which the camera doesn't know what to do and you can't see the enemies anymore. You can play around this one by keeping this in the back of your mind and avoiding being backed up into a wall but I still don't think you should be able to be put into such a situation. The main issue with the camera is with larger enemies. Whenever you're fighting a large boss, the camera is too zoomed in. It becomes difficult to see what you're trying to parry and it can get to a point where you can't even see at all what the boss is doing in a certain moment if they chain some fast paced attacks that also have them moving around a lot. To give some examples, this issue is present with Fallen Archbishop Andreus and especially the Green Monster of the Swamp. They aren't the only ones and what's most frustrating about this issue is that it's very easy to fix by just zooming the camera out slightly to give you just a little bit more vision. The game even does this already when you fight the Puppets of the Future - the colossal puppets that move very slowly. Very strange that they felt the need to implement a camera zoom out there but not during main boss fights. This could have then potentially been an oversight but this issue is still present in the DLC, with the most egregious example being the Anguished Guardian of the Ruins. Another issue with the boss fights in this game is that there's sometimes a lack of clarity. I believe Laxasia the Complete to be the best boss fight in the game. Feels great to fight her, she's challenging but not unfair. However, in the 2nd phase they went overboard with the effects of electricity around her, sometimes making it too difficult to see what she is doing. This is also an issue in the Nameless Puppet fight where the first phase feels great to fight against but then the 2nd phase goes crazy with the effects from the blade, obscuring the players vision. The most egregious example of this is the final boss of the DLC. I don't believe this to be a way to up the difficulty but if it is then that's a very cheap and artificial way to go about it. I believe clarity should always be a priority in the design of these boss fights, you should never be fighting anything else other than the bosses moveset.

God, the controls in this game are just so stupid. I mean, they’re STUPID.

I play with keyboard and mouse, and I have seven buttons on my mouse and about eighty on my keyboard. But what difference does it make when I don’t even have the option to assign two separate hotkeys for my two belts? Instead, I have to SCROLL through my items, pick which belt is active, and when everything is perfectly set, I can finally press a hotkey to use it. WTF?

And then there’s the quick access bag. To use it, you have to hold down the “E” key, which allows you to access the slots bound to keys 1–4. My question is, why do I have to hold “E” at all? Why can’t I just press 1–4 directly to use them? You can’t even trigger them instantly, because you have to hold down “E” for about a second before those slots become active. And don’t even think about putting the Grinder on those slots, because to use the Grindstone you’ll have to press three keys at once — “E,” Shift, and a slot number. Also, have you ever tried pressing “E” and “4” together while keeping your hand on WASD? Go ahead and try it, and you’ll see what I mean.

So why is the control scheme so bad? The answer is simple: it was completely copied from FromSoftware games. Over there, you could at least justify it because of PvP; giving keyboard players perfect controls might have given them too big an advantage in multiplayer. But this game has no PvP at all, and they just copied that without ever thinking about the comfort of the players.

The controls are so unnecessarily complicated that I genuinely considered leaving a negative review. But the beautiful atmosphere and amazing monster and level designs ultimately outweighed it for me.

And honestly, this stupid control scheme is the only thing keeping me from instantly buying the DLC. I just don’t want to press three keys at once for a basic action ever again. Please, can I never have to do that?