I demo’d this at Pax East and the combat felt very off putting. I love a good souls style game so difficult combat doesn’t scare me away but I constantly felt like I was battling the controls on this one. I imagine part of the problem was the demo team did a poor job explaining the controls and then threw you into a boss fight, so that didn’t help.

The first problem was you have limited stamina which normally is fine, but the combat in the game is hyper fast and the bosses were very aggressive and relentless so you very quickly ran out of stamina and then never really got a chance to recover it as the boss’s attack patterns didn’t allow for it.

The next problem was none of your attacks seemed to stagger or slow the boss, so he would just counter attack through one of your own attacks and send you flying. Again this may be due to missing some of the combat nuances through lack of explanation but it just felt like there was never really a way to attack without being punished.

I loved the look of it but it just did not feel fun to play and felt like they had different combat systems that were in opposition to each other. If they want fast combat that you have to constantly be dodging that’s fine, but they need to drop the very limited stamina mechanic or change how much is consumed. I’ll be keeping an eye out to see if they make any changes but as it is now, I wouldn’t recommend it unfortunately.

The default buttons were just not what I would normally consider standard for the type of game it is (Jump on Square, for example) which is whatever, I’m sure you can remap controls. But I was trying to do one encounter which I thought would be easy enough, yet required excruciating precision to pull off, almost as if you had to juggle a button combo while carefully moving and dodging with painfully limited stamina at the same time.

It’s not like “Dark Souls is hard, guys” type of gameplay, but rather that the controls just seemed to be fighting me with a lot of the basic things I would try to do. Definitely one of the least intuitive experiences I’ve had recently.