Recent reviews by Dragon Bitch

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

=== ( 🎯 Difficulty ) ===
☐ No Difficulty
☐ Easy
☐ Standard
☑ Big Learning Curve
☐ Hard
☐ Impossible

=== ( 👪 Audience ) ===
☐ Everyone
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Mature

=== ( 👀 Graphics ) ===
☐ What Is This?
☐ Bad
☐ Acceptable
☐ Good
☐ Great
☑ Stylistic
☐ Beautiful
☐ Masterpiece

=== ( Sound/Music ) ===
☐ Bad
☐ Nothing Special
☑ Okay
☐ Great
☐ Beautiful
☐ I´m Gonna Cry

=== ( 🌏 Story ) ===
☐ This Game Has No Story
☐ Nothing Special
☐ It´s Alright
☑ Well Written
☐ Epic Story
☐ Thinking About It, When I Sleep

=== ( Grinding ) ===
☐ Nothing To Grind
☐ Isn't Necessary To Progress
☐ Average Grind Level
☑ A Lot Of Grinding
☐ You‘ll Need A Second Life For Grinding

=== ( 💎 Price ) ===
☐ Free
☐ Underpriced
☑ Perfect Price
☐ Could Be Cheaper
☐ Overpriced

=== ( ☣ Requirments ) ===
☐ A Toaster Could Run This
☐ Low
☐ Average
☑ Above Average
☐ High End
☐ NASA Computer

=== ( ⏰ Game time/length ) ===
☐ Really short ( 0 - 4 hours)
☑ Short ( 4 - 12 hours)
☐ Average ( 12 - 24 hours)
☐ Long ( 24+ hours)
☐ Multiplayer/Neverending

=== ( 🐞 Bugs ) ===
☐ Game itself is a bug
☑ Lot of bugs
☐ Few Bugs
☐ Nothing

=== ( Controller Support ) ===
☐ Yes
☑ no

=== ( Enjoyment ) ===
☐ I´d Rather Watch Grass Grow
☐ Hard To Enjoy
☐ Repetitive
☐ It's Okay
☑ Fun To Be Had For Sure
☐ The Kind Of Fun You Will Remember
☐ Life Changing

=== ( Replayability ) ===
☐ One-Time Experience
☐ Only For Achievements
☑ If You Wait A Few Months/Years
☐ Definitely
☐ Infinitely Replayable/Multiplayer

=== ( Worth Playing ) ===
☐ No
☐ Wait For A Sale
☑ Yes
☑ I Can´t Recommend It Enough

TOP FUN THINGS TO DO:
⭐️ Trying out different weapon combinations.
⭐️ Combat is fun (to a point).
⭐️ intensity of situations and the souls-like aspects.

THE UNIQUES:
💎 Voice acting is definitely above average/good for a VR game, especially an RPG.
💎 Unique visuals and a good parallel to the Souls-like experience in VR.
💎 Interesting potential for unique builds and crafting.

PLAYER GAMING REQUIREMENTS:
💼 Single Player.
💼 Story Rich (potentially).
💼 Soulsborne difficulty.

PROS:
+ Combat is mostly fluid and engaging.
+ Character designs are charming for the most part and well-voiced.
+ Controls are mostly intuitive.
+ Very much embodies the Soulsborne feel in VR.
+ Has an actual story unlike many sandbox VR RPG games.
+ Fantastic audio design on a whole, it feels weighty and present.
+ A lot of potential.

CONS:
- Combat can be clunky (especially with larger/heavier weapons.)
- Inventory management (fannypack) is unacceptably bad.
- No visible stamina/block bar for the player.
- Armored enemies tend to be damage sponges.
- Magic/archery is underwhelming and wholly overshadowed by melee.
- Large weapon variety but few weapons/combinations are really effective.
- The grind isn't terrible for what is essentially a demo but killing enemies is unrewarding and overtly grindy, even for a Souls clone.
- Combat boils down to 'find unarmored part of enemy and hack at it until it dies' which leads to overly tanky enemies.
- Audio cues for deaths and stuns are lacking.

VERDICT:
For what is the first chapter in a supposedly three-chapter+ game, I'd say it very much feels like a VR but Dark Souls. Overall, the sound design of the weapons and environments are nice, which is undercut by a lackluster musical score and underwhelming enemy sounds. The combat is fluid and great until you find that most enemies won't attack for a certain period after you strike a hit, so you can hack away until they die without having to engage with other mechanics. The intended use of the armor system, which is to hit the shield/armor until its dropped/breaks ends up creating excessively long fights that are easily solved by finding the one unarmored part of an enemy and just hacking away. While so close to being good, the combat ultimately falls short with poor enemy AI and bullet-sponge enemies (even for a souls game). I want to love it, and early on I really did, but the more I played the more I got tired of "hit the knight's knees until they die" or "bash the axe guy in the head until he dies."

All of which is made worse by the slog of a grind the game has, where 'zombie with helmet and axe that takes four hits to kill' rewards as many 'souls' as 'knight who takes 20+ hits to kill. I get the game is still in development and there's a big skill tree planned, but with four hours of gameplay, at the Chapter One final boss, and only losing my Matter (about 400 of it) completely once, I've barely leveled up four or five times. Which, even for a Souls-like, feels way too grindy.

The story, while interesting in concept and held up by a very competent VA team, feels very bare-bones and generic fantasy. It can be really good and has elements that are genuinely interesting, but are held back by the fat that this is only the first chapter of a much more ambitious title. I want more of it, but only really because the world itself is interesting and I'm really interested in a VR Souls-like, not because the story itself is particularly engaging.

Also as much as I liked the masked-woman's design and its homage to the firekeepers in DS, her mask would 100% look better if it were inverted to cover the lower half of her face and leave her eyes visible (or just fully cover her eyes entirely).

Total Score = 70/100.

■■■■■■■□□□ 7 / 10
Needs some more oomph with the swish!

REVIEWER SPECS
OS: Windows 10 or better
Processor: Ryzen 7900x
Memory: 64 GB DDR5 RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 4090
Storage: Samsung 990 Pro

Overall not as good as the first two games, though, ironically, the DLCs are better than the main game.