izigame.me

Played the first game completely through to the end in light of this game releasing soon. I enjoyed it. The game had some minor issues and I had my annoyances with the combat, but I gave it time. Got Henry skilled up and became a competent fighter (Aka unlocked Master Strikes and spammed it for the rest of the game), still though I was hoping that for the Sequel there would be some major improvements to the combat..
Was I ever disappointed when I started playing. Fighting more than 1 enemy is still egregiously annoying but purely because of the awful targeting that has not seemed to have improved even in the slightest. Swinging your weapon still uses way too much stamina so using combo strikes is never a viable option in combat. Once again you have to B-line it to the sword trainer, cheese him with clinching to learn master strikes and now proceed to bait every single enemy encounter with the same tactic as the first game. The only "improvement" that I could see was that there are only 4 stance directions instead of 5. Its kind of baffling to me as in their presentation they claimed they were making it a more approachable experience for new players when honestly it doesn't really feel that way.
Even now I'd still look past it but there are other compiling issues that aren't helping. To put it plain and simply, this game's starting sequence just isn't remotely as good as the first one. I'm not as engaged narrative wise, the beginning quest lines are spread ridiculously far and outside of stealing one there's no proper way to acquire a horse in the 8hrs I've played so far. As an experienced player this is not the end of the world, but once again for the "new" players that they seemed to want to appeal to in the reveal, this is going to very discouraging. Obviously we can't have a second Skallitz but there is just straight up not even an introductory area. I don't feel like i'm starting a new game, I feel like I'm halfway through a quest and it stole all of my items...
The icing on the cake is all of silly jank of interacting with the world is still very much prevalent here. Watching a woman chop a man up only to have her flee running for the guards to report me for theft because I looted his sword after she brutally butchered him. Encountering bandits mugging someone while fast traveling only for the victim to go running to the town to report me for murder after defending myself whence they attacked me. Every run of the mill bandit being a master swordsman so each fight looks more like a Jedi Lightsaber duel with either side trading perfect blocks on ripostes again and again and again.
I'm well past the refund point now, so I'm just going to will myself to stick it out and at least finish the main story but needless to say I'm pretty disappointed. If my opinion changes over time I'll adjust the review accordingly, but I'm mostly just writing this for my friends to see and have more of an understanding of what they are getting into, just in case they were considering buying it. Its more of the same, if not a little lackluster. If you are able to justify spending the money on this I'm happy for you, otherwise it never hurt anyone to wait for a few updates and a price drop!