Die by the Blade Review (V)
Played all day yesterday, really enjoyed it, but honestly I think it would have been best to put it in the EA oven before an official release as there are several problems that are noticeable just within the first hour of play.
What I liked:
-Game runs super smoothly overall both from a performance and network* perspective. *(I'll touch on the network side of things again below)
-Different maps you fight in are gorgeous
-Feels really good to hit a finisher
-Camera really gives you the bushido duel to the death vibe
What I disliked:
-Couple of elements missing from the UI, notably:
1-Your ping to the opponent
2-Your stats (especially rating)
-Couple of QoL missing:
1- Having to reselect your character, your skin and your weapon every time you enter a match.
2- Unable to rematch/requeue after a match.
3- Going back to Offline -> Versus and having to select Online -> Ranked Match after every match
-Sound effects and Music could be improved upon, especially sound effects, not that the current ones are bad, but adding some to certain animations or certain segments, and giving more variety to the current ones would feel better imo (different ones for different characters/weapons maybe?)
-Bug: You're not awarded coins and exp if you leave the score screen too fast after a match
-Inputs are inverted both horizontally and vertically if you're on p2 side: so this one's a little weird, it's a fighting game convention that a horizontal directional input+strike input move/combo becomes inverted on the p2 side, but in this game, it's also the case for vertical directional input, so a move that requires a up input will need to be inverted to a down input on p2 side to work, that's just weird to me.
What will make me quit this game:
-I mentioned that the game runs very smoothly above, but unfortunately that's only the case if your opponent isn't in freakin Singapore (shoutout to my homie https://www.twitch.tv/xk3nnyx_lim, our matches may have been laggy but at least I made a friend :D) There isn't any region lock, ping lock, there's nothing, I get that you dont want to split the player base, but if you want the rest of your player base to stay, there needs to have a ping limit 100%.
-Expanding on the point above, there is no rollback netcode, meaning that if you play against an opponent with a high enough ping (which the game doesn't tell you in advance), you may have the parry input literally showing on your side, but the opponent's move will still go through, this is super frustrating.
I still recommend it, it's good fun!!