Recent reviews by kappakappa

Bad performance and sounds, low clarity, riddled with bugs. Mouse acceleration... really?

Empty.

Horrible menu navigation, clumsy gunplay, underwhelming AI, freezes and crashes, broken matchmaking.

awesome 10/10 i'm strong king now

seagull goes squawk 𓅪

Very well polished movement mechanics. Fluid and responsive controls.
You can make it either relaxing or challenging.

Some things are not very well explained (eg different areas/districts and different route types and the direction you should take them), but it doesn't take long to understand them by yourself, so not really a problem.
I wish it was a bit longer.

10/10 recommended, you won't regret buying it :)

BEFORE I BEGIN
It's my first Souls game, so i have a fresh take on it. It's my opinion, feel free to disagree.
I don't play PvP.

I like when games don't spoon feed you with a checklist of tasks, but instead you have to dig through the game to find what to do.
Elden Ring takes this approach, but the complete lack of a journal made it difficult to keep track of my progress.
I would have liked to have a journal that tracks all the dialogues for every NPC (while not being a boring checklist of things to do, but still something to rely on when i'm following multiple questlines).
I know you can go back every time and re-listen to the NPCs, but it's very impractical.

I found the story to be overall unappealing. That comes from the lack of a journal (reasons mentioned above) that would have encouraged me to progress through the quests.
The questlines themselves are mostly short and unattractive. Even the longer ones are very repetitive and required me to go back and forth between the same places multiple times.
They just felt like a waste of time, with uninteresting backstories.
There are a couple of exceptions to this, but overall there is a very small amount of quests and the story felt very dull.
There are no factions in the game, very disappointing.
I would have expected different factions with different questlines that potentially intertwine, but all i found was some girls in the wild in need of help.

The game made it very enjoyable for me to explore around the map and discover secrets hidden in secluded location.
But that's where the fun ends, sadly.
Although the game is an open world, it felt dead: it's just full of enemies and bosses randomly scattered in the wild, without random NPCs or villages that would help the game feel alive and provide small tasks to carry out while taking a break from the main questline.
This kept reminding me in a very unnatural way that the game revolves around the player. I know it wouldn't particularly fit with the setting/story but i think it's a missed opportunity.
The game doesn't scale with the player's level, this marks a very precise path of gradual increase in difficulty for the player to take.
The problem with that is that, unless you skip huge areas of the game, you'll find yourself overlevelled and the game becomes extremely easy to beat.
It felt like going through a tunnel, you can't just say "in this playthrough i'm going to start from this other area and do quests from here", you are restricted to a certain path with minimal variation. Low replayability.
The map gets progressively emptier as the game goes on, the first region is filled with dungeons and places to explore, while as you progress further in the game there are more and more empty areas and the last region is even 75% inaccessible.

The very first story boss you encounter is one of the hardest to defeat. From there the game is downhill until the later ones.
One thing to point out is that many of the bosses you encounter early in the game appear again and again as the game progresses as minor bosses. By the mid/end of the game this gets a bit repetitive.
That being said, the soundtracks that play during boss fights are very good and immersive and the bosses themselves have interesting move sets and phases and need to be tackled with different approaches, good stuff.
Honestly the bosses are what really keep this game afloat and made me want to come back for the challenge, still some of them are too easy/predictable.
The game can be challenging if you don't overlevel, but on my first playthrough, when i tried to do everything, i didn't face any real challenge.

I found it to be well refined and balanced for PvE (i don't play PvP as mentioned above). Weapons, weapon skills, spells and incantations felt unique and well designed.
My only complaint here is that in the menus you don't see a preview of what weapon skills do before applying them to the weapon, there is just a (often vague) text description.
It was fun to play around with different weapons, plus it was easy to reassign my stats when i wanted to change playstyle.

Consistent graphics and good looking game all around. In some places you can take very stunning screenshots. Some minor imperfections, but they don't break the immersion.

The game is capped at 60fps, not a fan of that, but not the end of the world. Just disappointed since it's a game that came out in 2022 and it's very easy to implement, just shows laziness.
It keeps frame dropping to 10-20fps for no reason, it's not even a matter of first time loading an area, just random.
There is a very clear difference in optimization between areas, and the rain is just an unnecessary feature that makes the performance even less consistent.
The hitboxes in PvE are poorly executed, both the body and weapons. Sometimes bosses swing their weapons through the ground below you and still hit you, or an invisible aura around them pushes you off a ledge.
There is no collision control, if an enemy swings its sword from the other side of a wall it's going to hit you, when bosses charge their attacks while near a wall sometimes you can't see them coming because they are half inside it.
Some AOE boss attacks have weird hitboxes that don't match the visuals.
One of the most annoying things that happened constantly was that my summons, prioritizing the closest enemy, targeted monsters outside the boss room.
This way i was often left alone with the boss and had to run to the other side of the boss room and summon from there, exposing myself to attacks.

The most annoying thing about mouse and keyboard controls is that the camera always moves around on its own and you have to constantly fight it with your mouse.
For example if you move with your character while looking in another direction, the camera will try to follow it automatically.
Another big problem is the automatic lock feature: when you are fighting bosses in the open, slightly moving your mouse will result in your character changing target to some irrelevant passive enemy.
The interface is clearly designed to be used with a controller, and very awkward to use with mouse and keyboard. Unintuitive use of Q and E to select stuff, ESC is just not a thing.
Sometimes there are yes/no prompts on screen mid fight and the only way to press yes is by reaching with your mouse.
The keybind customization for mouse and keyboard is very limited.
For example you can't use separate keys for roll and sprint, tap to roll, hold to sprint.
This implies a huge input delay for rolling since the activation is on key release.

Although i enjoyed it, i can't leave a positive review since it could have delivered much more.
Buy, it's fun :)