Macca780

I am having a blast with this game. It is very much a love letter to Super Metroid and that is a huge plus for me. The big difference here is the rogue-lite element. Every death takes you right back to the start with a new random level/boss layout. This is really addictive because you never know what crazy weapons and power ups you will get each "run" or which new bosses you will face. The weapons and power ups are very interesting and varied and I still find myself getting excited every time I find something new even though I've killed the final boss twice already. The controls are tight, shooting feels good and jumping is precise. The enemy design is really cool with a fleshy body horror aesthetic. The bosses are really imaginative and fun to fight although one or two do feel a bit cheap sometimes (I'm looking at you headless, toxin spewing fiend). The only thing I would change (and hence why I gave it a 9 instead of 10) would be some enemies are a time wasting chore to get through especially when they respawn every time you re-enter a room. An example of this are the stationary blobs that release a small monster when hit. I have to crouch and shoot for a good 15 - 20 seconds each time and it's just boring. But aside from that, this game is fantastic and very, very addicting. Try it out!

Attention! Anyone who likes souls-like games, pixel art and atmosphere, please try this game! I loved every minute of this. The gameplay is superb. Combat feels very deliberate, weighty, crunchy and at the same time fluid and tight. I never felt like I died to cheapness during fights. There are myriad weapons, shields, armour, trinkets and other perk/stat changing options to play around with and combine and all of the builds I tried felt viable. Being a rogue-like, everything you accumulate during a run is lost on death but with regular checkpoints and fairly frequent permanent unlocks for weapons, armour, shields, etc. this never became annoying or tiresome. On the contrary, this made the game more interesting as I never knew what new interesting weapon I would find and use on my next run and I was so elated every time I found a new permanent weapon unlock. The atmosphere and music is hauntingly dark and gloomy. I really felt the cold, damp, isolation of the dungeon rooms and the creepy, abandoned church settings, etc. There were a few tracks in particular that got stuck in my head as they were quite poignant. If pixel art is your thing, this game does not disappoint. The artwork was meticulously detailed and boss designs were incredible. The bosses all felt very fair while still being quite tough. A small minority of them were perhaps a little on the easy side as I was able to beat them in one or two tries but the vast majority were a real challenge without being cheap or ridiculous. The variety in boss design and mechanics was fantastic. No two bosses were anything alike and I was always on my toes. In summary, there is nothing I can really fault this game for (except maybe some cheap spike traps in the first area, although these can be avoided by looking down before jumping off ledges). I have nothing but praise for everything about this game and I'm really gobsmacked that the review scores aren't way higher. This is not at all like dead cells beyond the rogue-like element and it's not quite a souls game either, so those comparisons fall short and aren't entirely fair. It is it's own thing and it's very much worth checking out

Signed up just to review this and do my part. Please people, heed my warning. This game is NOT what you are expecting if you are a fan of FromSoftware's previous famous titles. I cannot believe the sheer volume of perfect 10s this game is recieving. Over-zealous fanboys/girls are really doing a disservice to this company by blindly praising this game. Yes the gameplay is quite different to souls, but in a really bad, unfair, not fun way (unless you belong to the small population of super-elite gamers who have no other life and spend all waking hours playing this and poo pooing everyone else) I gave this a three only because I really did like the beautiful environments, sound effects and music. The option to have the dialogue in Japanese with subtitles also adds to the experience. Unfortunately for me and many others, this is where the positives end. Having soloed all the other souls/borne games and many other souls-like games from other developers and loving them, I was excited to say the least when this was announced. The way it was advertised made it look like a souls game set in medieval Japan with added gameplay mechanics (grappling hook, jumping, limited on-the-spot death revival, etc.) and sped up combat. This couldn't be any further from the truth. In reality this game is far closer to Ninja Gaiden or fighting games due to the reflex-based combat but far harder and not fun. Let me explain. The combat is so unbelievably fast and twitch-reflex based that is it just obnoxious. Playing this like a souls game will get you killed in seconds and that's fine, it's not Dark Souls, BUT, even playing this game as it was intended requires either unaturally high level of reflex or literally life-consuming levels of practice to build up super fine tuned muscle memory. Strategising, carefulness and character building have been thrown out the window. Most people who have an actual life do not want to spend their free time playing a game that requires weeks or months of slogging to grasp the basics. The previous FromSoftware games did require learning and implemented a steep learning curve but even still, were more forgiving than this. They also offered large amounts of variety and reward for overcoming that curve which leads me to my next point. Sekiro's offers absolutely no gameplay variety, particularly for bosses. You are stuck with one main, unalterable weapon and NO armor options for the whole game. Sure there are prosthetics, but they are few and far between and largely not necessary. More importantly there is no variation in play style. You have to rely almost solely on deflecting (parrying) and countering. For bosses you have to learn when exactly to hit the deflect button, the dodge button, the jump button, or the attack button. Failure to do so EXACTLY as the devs intended results in death. In this way I felt like I was playing guitar hero but where one wrong button-push resulted in a complete start over. I was locked into a precise pattern of unfairly fast reflex button pushing. These decisions have to be made in