izigame.me

I don't think I've ever hated a game this much before.
As clickbaity as that sounds, it's true. I went into this game knowing its reputation and some of its bigger issues indepth, but I tried my best to be positive and give it a fair shot, because I don't enjoy hating things. I even sunk enough hours into it to earn all achievements across three different playthroughs. And yet, each playthrough left me more and more frustrated. I would be surprised if this game wasn't rushed from start to finish, because it's an absolute mess.
- Story and characters are generic and unmemorable. No character depth or development, just the edgiest, most heavy handed "everyone is a jerk" approach possible. It's that soulless kind of "dark" tone you'd find in a 90's comic book, and it just makes you wonder why you should even care about what's happening.
- Graphics technically look nice, but none of the area, character, or enemy design is very distinct or memorable, to the point I probably wouldn't be able to point out half the bosses if you put them all in a row.
- Music is okay, and there's a couple of tracks I really enjoyed, but most of it doesn't really stick out either. There's only two or three boss themes, too, to the point even the final boss gets stuck with a reused one. Voice acting is all pretty bad, either annoyingly hammy or completely emotionless and forced.
- Combat feels terrible. Almost every weapon type takes several seconds to get out even a light attack, while all the enemies attack and recover in half that time. There's absurd amounts of tracking added to basically all attacks, which usually results in some big guy sliding at you from halfway across the room, and removes any sort of weight or impact to your attacks. Most encounters are either abusing running attacks or blocking, circle strafing, and attacking while the enemy recovers. Rolling doesn't seem to have i-frames, which makes it almost useless. Enemy variety is very lacking, and once you figure out the tricks to each enemy type, they cease being any real threat because of how dumb they are.
- Every boss battle feels the same. It all just comes down to waiting for the boss to do that one attack that leaves them vulnerable, because they attack faster than you, and they'll always interrupt your attacks, no matter how much poise you have. The only thing that breaks it up are the gimmicks that get introduced whenever you deplete enough HP. The secret challenges that get you special versions of boss weapons would be a good idea, if more than two of them were ever hinted at. Even when you know about them, most of them are absurdly dumb and arbitrary, like beating the second boss without using your shield.
- Agility and faith playstyles are blatantly tacked on. The majority of the weapons you get are catered to strength builds, with agility builds only having access to a few weapon types, and faith being almost completely restricted to hammers for the entire game. Faith magic is also absurdly broken, mainly thanks to Shelter, a spell that automatically regenerates your HP, in a game where health management is supposed to be a major factor. I barely even used health potions on my faith playthrough.
- It's about as buggy as a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game, without the excuse of being a wide open world with tons of content. Literally every technical issue I can think of finding in a modern game are here, crashes, sound effects not playing, enemies getting launched into the sky on death, controls completely locking up, randomly not displaying what items you actually picked up, and the list goes on and on. It's not just that these things happen, it's that you can't go 5 minutes without running into them. This is quite possibly the least polished game I've ever played.
And that's just some of my complaints. I could go on for hours, but you get the point. This was a game meant to rip off Dark Souls, without any real understanding of Dark Souls' design philosophy. Some people like to say that people only hate this game because it isn't Dark Souls, and I can say that couldn't be less true. I hate this game because of attacks with absurdly big hitboxes that actively chase you down. I hate this game because it always feels like it's on the verge of crashing and erasing however much progress you've made since you last saved. I hate this game because it feels like there's no rules or consideration put into the design, and you're just expected to brute force your way out of every encounter. I'm not trying to insult the devs. They actually made good with their experience with this game and went on to make the Surge, so it's not like it was a complete waste of effort, but that doesn't make the experience any less frustrating. I got this game on sale for $3, and out of all the $3 purchases I've made in my life, this was by far the worst.