What a flawed but fucking fun ass videogame. Picked it up a while back when some anons were talking about the sequel being revealed at E3 and finally got around to beating it including its expansion 'walk in the park' and boy is it flawed but the good really outweighs the bad.
Pros
>Themes and worldbuilding: the idea of some steve jobs type hiring cripples who want to walk again using exosuits to restart the earths atmosphere and a power surge turning them into stroke victims whos bodies are being piloted by the exo suits to kill each other was some interesting body horror. Midway that turns into straight up VIRUS meets Dead Space and by the end when it turns out the surge was a failure in containment of a new nanite project to mechaform organic life to survive a hostile enviroment was a nice sense of escalation a lot of souls style games outside of bloodborne really fail to impress. The ending with the US government sending black ops into the facility like the start of a horror movie as they notice a rocket has blasted off and is showering nanites in the upper atmosphere was a neat teaser for the next game too.
>Combat speed: while this does lead to some cheap enemy moves one shotting you the first few times you run into them the dash in, dash out combo heavy combat was like a more visceral bloodborne. Almost like what Absolver tried to do but faster. Unlike Dark Souls or even Nioh this really tested my reaction times and every interaction felt like a parry test in a character action game. At first you go 'thats so fuckin' cheap!?!' when you get wombo comboed and lost all your health and scrap but coming back later when you know their moves in the same gear and completely bullying the fuck out of them is so satisfying.
>The levels: This game is some metroidvania tier shortcut porn that even DS1 cannot come close to. You can spend an hour delving deep into some dank sub basements and ventilation shafts then find an access hallway for maintenance and ride a small ladder style micro lift up it and come out right at the games equivalent of the zones main bonfire. This means far less checkpoints so exploring risks losing exp more often but the trade off is exploration is its own reward with so many shortcuts leading back to the checkpoint so you can go back, power up and circumvent a bunch of mobs and continue your adventures. I can't name another game that did it to this degree.
>Post DLC: after the expansion the entire game got rebalanced and its so much better than the demo i tried way back on release that didn't sell me. There are tons more weapons and movesets to try and shit like flamethrowers arent a hard progress wall at the mid point like launch reviews said they were.
Cons
>5 main game bosses 2 in the dlc: The bosses are all fine. They range from Taurus Demon to Amygdala in difficulty and each felt different enough to be memorable and enjoyable. But the game needed more, maybe 3 or 4 solid ideas for bosses in areas like the botanical research could have made it feel a lot less like clearing corridors just for shortcuts sake
>a fixed protagonist: the reveal at the start of playing a cripple was interesting, but after that he is pointless as a character. Often a huge reveal like a character being an ai hologram has no dialogue or reaction from warren at all and im glad 2 has a character creator
>Bullshit final area enemies: There may only be a handful of nanite masses you have to interact with to progress the critical path but when you do they are horseshit even after you learn how to kill them and deal with their moves. At least 6 times i did a forward leap attack and it just started a melee animation and i was already dead
>Maybe use more songs that the single 'i was borrrrn, in a prisssooooon' one on repeat.
Overall i'm glad anons recommended it. Its a solid 6/10 game that has flaws but consiering this is the lords of the fallen team is a dramatic increase in quality and fun. Can't wait to see what the sequels like at E3. For once a /v/ recommendation wasn't horseshit, who knew?