Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsIt's really mediocre.
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2016
Plays very poorly on the system, though in general it isn't a very optimized game anyway (have it on pc, xbone, and rented on ps4) so it's safe to say it's probably not the hardware and instead is just shoddy design on the dev's side.
Otherwise: meh color pallet, too reminiscent of bloodborne and NOT a Souls game. Combat is quicker which is welcome, but puts a strain on the series combat style of slow and focused emphasizing reaction based actions and greatly encourages a meta of quick weapons, again; removal of poise with hyper armor in it's place gives me flashbacks of Demon's Souls pvp, not a fan, personally, though this could be greatly compensated for with an increase in push-back on weapons. OST is pretty good, as usualy, From does a good job and getting great tracks for bosses. Sound in general seems like a step up as I feel genuinely limited if I can't hear the game, making it a pro/con on it's own as it limits my ability to listen to my loud music while playing. Animations are much smoother, taking after BB and DKS2 making actions feel more fluid, however this is hard to appreciate with such higher enemy density and enemy speed forcing me to roll away more often than not and thus not utilize a lot of the, subjectively, "cooler" moves and move sets. Patches almost entirely useless on PC, personally, sometimes causing further loss in performance, something patches should not do.
tl;dr
pros:
-Good OST
-Good animation
cons:
-Quick enemies (reduces reason to use cool moves/weapons)
-terrible drop rate (though this has always been the case for me and these games: 72 hr Balder side sword farming)
-weak, weak, WEAK color pallet for the game, a huge step down from even the last Souls title.
Pro/con:
-art direction feels far too Bloodborne-y for a souls game with lanky enemies, weird beasts, and a odd use of fungus like growths on enemies
-upped game speed increase gives quick weapons a nice boost but once again hinders reasonable application of heavy weapons, though is fine if you tank (pack healing tho)
-frequent patches
cons (more personal)
-AWFUL optimization (framedrops across all systems seemingly regardless of hardware and updates)
-Anti cheat almost banned my acc for using windowed mode (pc version though)
-game style really emphasizes a quality build meta again, reducing build variety at a core level
-some patches seem pointless/caused performance drops
Buy or pass?
Wait till it's hella cheap, I got a giftcard which knocked the price down to about 9 dollars, feels almost worth it considering the poor optimization on the xbone.
