izigame.me

Trash... it's broken. They have a great game here but didn't play test it. All of the movement speeds are wrong. You can knock enemies down and they will get back up and heal or attack before your next swing in a combo lands... so what was the point of knocking them down? Why do I need this much stamina if I just have to back off and wait? Why can't I even use some of that stamina to roll back and prepare another attack? Why am I so slow? This is at your fastest movement speed and goes for almost all enemies including ones that move very slowly in every other way.
Most enemies can't have their attack animations canceled and will attack right through you, but yours can be canceled extremely easily, even at the end of a swing. You don't even trade blows, yours is just canceled and theirs gets through. This is with any level of armor and poise. It's all broken. Purposely taking a hit every now and then at key moments is a legit strategy... it' how you can fight multiple enemies at once. It's a decision you can make. That's the whole point of armor. But not in this game. There is no trade-off. You just take damage, get staggered, and either take more damage or miss your chance to attack. It is so stupid. There is barely any point to armor or blocking for that matter... you are encouraged to just to repeated hit and run attacks over and over since it's the only reliable tactic. Too bad you already dumped 30 levels into stamina or equipment load, huh? Bet you wish you could re-spec and dump it all into attacks now, huh? Well too bad, because you smashed the thing that lets you re-spec because this game tells you nothing. If it weren't for the internet, you wouldn't even know what abilities an entire list of items (trinkets) give you. You get a picture of them, and some lore, and that's it. No explanations. You have to google everything.
Back to this combat crap: Your stagger lasts 2 times longer than enemy's stagger animations, you stay knocked down for 4 times longer at least, and virtually every enemy can stagger you. In NG+ you can get staggered 10 times in a row by everything from arrows to baby spiders. The camera is drunken and floaty, and rolling in the proper direction is hit and miss. Your abilities have such long animations, and the combat is so slow, that utilizing any of the benefit is barely possible. Imagine lighting a a match and then letting it burn 75% of the way down before rushing to use it. That is this game's ability mechanic.
Changing items requires no other inputs beforehand for far too long, meaning you can't quickly swap to one or two handed stance without giving up a turn to block/attack. This game is literally slower than your reaction times. You are better than this game. The game is the problem not you. The game was made wrong. You cannot multitask in this game.
Combat is practically turn based as a result. It is anti-fun. It is so slow that gitting gud is literally accepting that you have to be bad. You have to be slow and noobish. You can't flex your timing abilities you learned through playing other games... you just have to force yourself to be a slow lumbering oaf. Tedium builds and builds until you just want to stop playing, including during some boss battles. This is without even taking any hits... the bosses are not difficult at all. The tedium is. It's so... freaking... slow. All the time. Building momentum and utilizing tactics that should work (and were clearly designed to work) won't work because the timings are all off. Heavy weapons are way, way too slow for most enemies if you want to move through areas at any appreciable pace. NG is too easy and then NG+ becomes an unfathomable slog that is borderline impossible at the very end. This game was functionally completed but they never tweaked it to be properly playable. The very last steps of development were clearly abandoned and thrown out the door. I won't even get into the bugs... they aren't particularly terrible but add up over the course of an already tedious and frustrating game. Do not play this. Play The Surge instead... a similarly slow paced and methodical game made by the same people that is actually good. Because they play tested it and everything works beautifully. It's much more challenging but more importantly, good. This game grinds your patience down like you wouldn't believe.
CI Games and Deck 13: Fix your game. Literally just change a few values... change some timings by 25-50% and you have a great game. As it is, you have a frustrating mess that leads players astray in terms of mechanics. You're dangling a carrot in front of us. Fix the game! It's so close to being good.
If you want proof as to how abandoned this game was after NG, picture this: There's a chest. The chest is locked. You need to use a rune to unlock it. You use the rune to unlock it. What's in the chest? Well, the item you got in NG isn't in it because you already have it. That's fine. So what's in the chest instead? An attribute point so you can level up quicker than once every 4 hours? That would be great. Let's use a rune and see what's in there. Oh... it's a rune. There's a rune in the chest. You fought your way to the chest and spent the rune to open the chest to get a rune out of the chest. Get off my computer.