fallacies

I tried this game after BG3, which I loved. Really was not expecting this drastic of a drop in quality. I hate this game.

It's a great game, but playing on a console is frustrating. They should have tried harder to to make it work with a keyboard and mouse. Autosave needs to happen more as well. I spent so long redoing sections because of bugs or surprises that locked me into a fight I couldn't win. Still a lot of annoying bugs 7 months after launch. Act 3 is a slogfest.

It kills me inside to give this game an 8. I have been anticipating it since it was announced, it has been an unhealthy obsession. The open world made it way too much of a slog. Traversal is annoying, fall deaths from exploring are tedious, the sheer amount of things trying to kill you at all times when you just want to explore, and your inability to fast travel or even look at the map when enemies are around you (basically always). I really hope fromsoft doesn't make exclusively open world games going forward. A big factor in how much you will like this game comes down to whether or not you like using spirit ashes and/or relying on summons for co-op. The game is clearly balanced for using spirit ashes, so if you use them, the difficulty is pretty manageable (exploration with all the enemies around is still tedious). But some bosses are just plain unfun by how difficult they are without spirit ashes. I for one, am not a huge fan of them. I hate a lot of bosses in this game. I really hate the final boss most of all. On my second playthrough I got all the way to the last boss and never finished the game. THe game starts out really strong, so you're tempted to play again, but then you get to a point where you're like, oh yeah, it's no longer fun after this point, or do I really want to go into that dungeon again? What's the reward for sompleting it again? Is it really worth it. Most of the time it's not because the reward is another spirit ash.

I played this game on pc when it was still in early access and I liked it, but as a complete version 1.0, I can't accept it. There is too much wrong with it. They programmed the skater to be regular and if you try to make your skater goofy they just give you a regular skater who is skating switch. I chose my skater to be goofy and as soon as the game started I was like "why is his footing so weird?" Well, that's why. One of the first missions is to do a trick on a manual pad that has a curve in it. Turning while manualing is so incredibly frustrating. The triggers just don't feel right for turning no matter how you adjust the settings, and he seems to just give up and put all 4 wheels down arbitrarily, despite me still holding the stick in the manual position. So why did they choose a curved manual pad for the location of their 2nd mission? Did they want to showcase how broken the game is? I finally did a manual kickflip out on it in hardcore mode and I wanted to pull out my hair by the time I landed it. Like many things in this game, it would have been easier to learn the trick in real life. THE GAME DIDN"T EVEN RECOGNIZE THAT I DID THEIR CHALLENGE! Then I did it again but this time I put 4 wheels down by accident before kickflipping off the ledge and then it recognized it as a make. That happened a bunch of times on the previous challenge too. I did like 4 nosemanuals and then on the last one I hit my back wheels on the way out and it recognized that one. Character models look really bad. You meet Mark Appleyard and he looks like a bum, then they show you the photo of him (there is no voice acting, just static photos with text) and you wonder how they made such a hideous in game model of such a handsome guy. Controls are way too finicky and don't give you feedback about what you're doing wrong, nor does the tutorial go in depth about the subtleties of the (questionable) game mechanics. For instance, I can't seem to frontside crooked grind without heelflipping out. Eventually I figured out that you have to pop out at the opposite angle that you're locked in, but even knowing that, he still heelflips out most of the time because it's so finnicky about the angle. It just feels broken in so many ways. If you try to do a line with quick footing, the game just doesn't respond to what you want to do. If you don't stay crouched long enough before you pop, the skater will just shuffle his feet to the front of the board to set up for a nollie. This game needs WAY more playtesting, fine tuning, and quality control. I'm more than happy to revise my review down the line because there are things I like about this game, but I'm offended that it's being a released as a complete game, and it's broken-ness extremely apparent even seconds into playing, that's why I'm giving this abysmal score. The game is decent as an early access game, but don't tell me this game was ready for launch. As much as I want to try and show love to smaller studios, this is a prime example of why bigger studios dominate the market.

In what seems like an effort to make the game more accessible (aka playable on phones and tablets) they basically ruined the game by eliminating any element of challenge. Now it's just clicking on different things on the screen to advance. Game is written like it's for kids, but also so chalk full of references to previous games, you really wonder who it was made for. Really dissapointing. The art style isn't great but that's the least of your worries. I wasn't a huge fan of MI4 (Monkey Kombat) or tales but I was able to finish them. This game I couldn't play longer than 30 minutes, it was too dissapointing. Worst in the series by far.

This game should be called bad caddy simulator, as the challenge does not come from timing your swings or reading the greens properly, but rather from the game constantly choosing the wrong club for you.

I'm giving it a 9 but I' rounding up from 8.5. I'm admittedly a FromSoft fanboy and this is an incredible game so it paints me to not give a perfect score, but the game has some flaws. First off, it's too hard. I beat it so I can say that. Beating certain bosses involves a lot of what some people would call "practice" and "skill" but what I call "memorizing attack patterns". It's hard in ways that seem unfair too like enemies just one or two-shotting you despite having all the health power-ups you can find, or hitboxes not being accurate. One problem I have with the combat, which arguably is my own problem and not the game's is that there are multiple types of unblockable attacks that have different ways of defending against, but they all flash the same red symbol on top of the enemy. You're supposed to react by reading the enemy attack animation, but now there is a big bright red symbol to distract you from what you're supposed to be looking at. That symbol more often than not just caused me to panic and press the wrong button knowing that the game doesn't give you a much time to react. And if you respond too early, like after seeing the symbol but before the right time in the animation, it can cause you to run right into the enemy's weapon. Another unreasonable thing I find about the difficulty is that some fights are more about inventory management and knowing how and when to use certain items than they are about practicing and refining your skill. There is a mechanic called "Terror" which builds up like poison or burn, but instead of draining your health when your meter is full, you just die no matter how much health you have. Certain enemy attacks will take a lot of your health and most of your terror meter, so if you get hit twice and don't heal as well as sedate yourself in between, that's game over. And if the boss uses terror attacks, there's a good chance you'll need another special item to do a significant amount of damage to them, and it's still going to be a tough fight. That means you'll probably have to farm items once you've died enough times. Enemy AI is pretty bad. They don't notice bodies on the floor, and they completely forget about you once you've left their field of vision for a few seconds. This is how a lot of stealth games work, but it feels out of place here where everything else is so difficult. I suspect they had to dumb down the AI or the game would have just been impossible. Maybe if it weren't so hard to begin with then the stealth could have been balanced better. This is all just speculation. Maybe AI just is bad because this style game is completely uncharted territory for FromSoft. There are also parts where enemies will fight each other, which is really entertaining, but you can wander into areas where they are standing right beside each other and haven't seen each other yet. The AI is probably the most objectively flawed thing in the game whereas other things are perhaps just sour **** from the difficulty. Traversal is fun but also feels unpolished at times. There are areas where you're supposed to access, and areas you're not, and it's hard to distinguish between them other than to just realize that your double jump or ledge grab isn't working. Sometimes you can reach areas you shouldn't which leads to other problems. Other time's you can't grab ledges that seem like the perfect thing to grab. I'm being a bit fickle here but I'm just trying to get all the bad stuff out of the way. As is to be expected from this developer the level design is unparalleled. Adding stealth mechanics to such a well thought out world is a brilliant combination. There is something very rewarding about finding the optimal path to take, and there is usually multiple ways to traverse. The storytelling is fantastic, all the bits of lore hidden and sprinkled throughout are so rewarding to discover. FromSoft knows they are good storytellers because they have you explore and complete quests, and reward you with items that do nothing more than unlock new dialogue from certain characters that provide a bit more insight into the story. Any other game you'd expect some weapon upgrade for your efforts, but Sekiro pulls it off because it is so immersive and wrapped in mystery that you want information more than anything. I know I had some bad things to say about the combat, but the posture system really is a creative approach and the timing based combat is really fun and rewarding to get good at, though not for the faint of heart or someone without a lot of time and energy to devote. There's a lot of really cool enemies with unique fighting styles. And there's a lot of fighting styles you can learn too. Fine upgrade content with the prosthetic arm as well. Visually, the game is breathtaking. The boss battles are so diverse and creative though i still have ptsd from some. The voice acting is really great too. This game should be an 11 out of 10 but the flaws I mentioned add up.