by lcom
Showing 1-6 of 6 items
There's something about the free to play structure that I think makes a lot of sense for a Souls game. Like there's something more honest about it. You get killed, and you drop the entire haul from that run, and it's not gone, but it is waiting there at the place where you died, which means there's a decent chance that you're just going to die again trying to get it back. This game has the honesty of self to pop up screen to say, "Hey, what would you say if we said we could just deliver all that stuff to you here at your safe spot, and all you had to do was just slide us a real ass money dollar across the table...?" It's like an interaction between player and game that makes such a punishing game structure make way more sense. It just makes me feel like I understand the entire game more, and not like I'm constantly playing without engaging with systems that I don't even know exist. Between that and the elevator-map striking a nice balance between vague, labyrinthine, and intuitive, this is the game I think about coming back to most out of a sense of curiosity and discovery than of obligation.
You know what I don't like? Endless grey and brown castles. You know what I do like? Huge fuckin' robot bosses. Okay, admittedly still endless industrial, but you can cut a chunk of armor off a boss and just strap that shit to your arm.
The multiplayer was maybe my favorite part of this game. Secretly join a players session, then try to blend in with the NPCs Assassin's Creed 2 MP style so they don't find you before the bar fills up. Except then add in that you can sit in a scissor lift and press it up against the bottom of a bridge, which is maybe super obvious behavior but then you can watch them struggle to figure out how to actually reach you.
I played this for like 20 minutes at a friend's house, and it was very Dark Souls. Perhaps, too Dark Souls.
From making a ninja game and it's not Tenchu feels like a false bill of sale. And it's definitely not Tenchu. If you're playing a Tenchu, and you find yourself in open combat, and it's not a rare but guaranteed terrible boss fight, you've already fucked up. This game a Souls. Managed to convince me that I probably don't actually want an Armored Souls.
High points for having Sif. Docked enough points to be knocked out of the top five for having to kill Sif.