izigame.me

Stray Blade feels like Dark Souls awkward little cousin that wants to be just like his older cousin. That being said, Stray Blade is still a great game.
Story
The story of Stray Blade is pretty generic and uninspired, but its good enough for a game that is more game play focused.
Visuals
The art style is pretty good and enjoyable. Feels like Kingdoms Of Amalur. Animations are fluid and smooth.
Audio/Voice Acting
Audio for the game is above average. Music is immersive and fits well into the world. Weapons sound good and impactful. Voice acting is, well they do their best. Which is still better than a lot of other games, but still comes off as a college theater performance. Dialogue is hit and miss, most of it is fine but there are parts that are awkward to listen too. Some of the dialogue choices get repeated too frequently, for example, "There is always more to find!" is repeated way more than necessary. There is also a pinging noise when ever you pick something up once you meet Boji that sounds more like a ping of an enemy noticing you.
Gameplay
Oooh boy, where to to begin. This part of the review is tricky because the combat feels amazing, once you get the hang of it. There are some very noticeable issues that are fundamental flaws and too ingrained into the game to be changed so they are here to stay. Attacking feels good and smooth, very fluid. Dodging, as one of their advertised features does in fact feel good.
Now here is where it all falls apart. Stray Blade relies too heavily on parrying and dodging. The enemies have no 'light attacks' every single attack an enemy does is something you have to dodge, parry or block. When you get hit, its very heavy damage from even the smallest of attacks. Such as when a two handed greataxe enemy uses a shove attack that your are supposed to parry, it will deal a whole bar of health even on adventure difficulty. On top of all of that every enemy attack staggers you while enemies have a poise bar you have to break in order to stagger them. For every staggering attack you get, you have to hit the enemy three to four times as much to get them to stagger.
The dodge and parry systems are very clunky. Although you can master them your are fighting those systems for control than rather having those systems in your control.
Enemies will glow red or blue depending on the type of attack they are about to do, but you aren't supposed to react to the colors, the game even tells you that. Which makes for an awkward as hell defensive system. Blue attacks (parry) start off with being in slow-mo(they are in slow-mo you are not) and then speed up to twice the speed so a lot of attacks are more difficult to parry then they should be, which makes combat awkward because you can't interrupt their attacks only if you manage to break the poise before it goes off and most attacks are too quick for that. I've only interrupted four enemy attacks. Trying to parry in Stray Blade feels like your fighting in waist deep water. Dodging is pretty standard, although there are some attacks that only glow red once even though you have to double dodge instantly because they will attack in quick succession which the game doesn't explain.
Performance
Stray Blades performance is above average although it definitely needs some more optimization. I have a 3060ti, Ryzen 7 3700x and 32gb of ram. I couldn't get above 30fps on ultra 1440p. Once I turned the graphics down to epic (which the visual changes are not even noticeable between epic and ultra so there shouldn't be such a huge hit to performance) and put my game into fullscreen at 1080, only then did I get 70+fps. Which fps is super important in this game because of the awkward parry and dodge systems.
Now there are some other issues that I hope the devs will address with some quick patches.
-After getting a new weapon or armor the stats for that piece will stay on the screen outside of the inventory till I open and close the inventory menu. This also happens after any kind of custscene which a random piece of gear in my inventory.
-Enemies in groups will often unaggro when an enemy is defeated.
-The game suffers from stutters at times
One personal issue I have is I wish the gear wasn't entirely crafting based. Would have been nice to come across some unique weapons and armor out in the world. However, everything in the game must be crafted.
The "skill tree" if you want to call it that, is just a half wheel of passive stat increases. I find it to be weird that when I master a weapon the only "skill" I can invest in is to make my light attacks do more damage, this isn't just for that specific weapon either. This stat will apply to any weapon you have equipped. All the "skills" are like this. There is no reason to "master" a weapon, there should have been at least 3-5 skills per weapon, 3 to add new attack moves or finisher and 2 passive skills. With their type of skill tree its just fill in the blanks till end game.
The balance of the game also feels weird since its a souls like game but there are difficulty settings.
At the moment I do not recommend this game till some of the performance issues have been address and maybe added some more polish to the game. I also can't explain it other than what I have already reviewed, but the game just feels awkward. It shouldn't, but it does.