I'm close to finishing this and it's an ok game.
Most puzzles are pretentious time-wasting devices devoid of any logical meaning while a few are pretty cool (
). This is Zelda-like only on paper. Having to move blocks around to reach ledges which otherwise are just a tiny bit out of reach kinda ruins the feeling of controlling a Horseman. Especially when you see him jumping high and performing crazy moves in cutscenes. Not sure if it was me just sucking, but I died quite a few times while attempting to jump from one platform to another, input apparently not being registered.
Difficulty balance is all over the place (Apocalyptic began hard, quickly got fair and now is super easy but with some super hard boss fights), camera needs babysitting during fight and collision detection is questionable (especially when trying to evade bosses' area attacks). Also, the goods seller should have been accessible before every boss fight or at least it should be possible to travel the world freely and come back when ready. Occurred to me a couple of times to not be ready and therefore having to work twice as hard to beat the thing. Very frustrating. Perhaps it's not an issue on Normal difficulty, but on Apocalyptic it was, sometimes.
Combat is fine. It's spectacular at times, but controls are slightly unintuitive and at times inaccurate (ie. want to block but end up dashing, and viceversa). Especially with small enemies, visual cues are sometimes hard to spot due to how close the camera is to the action, making hard to block and counter. It's also getting boring. I have yet to find reasons to use primary weapons other than the sword in combat. Not to mention try different combos. Good enemy mix up tho.
Technically is a mess. In open areas frame rate is constantly around the 20fps mark when panning camera around despite tearing like crazy. You don't notice this too much in the first couple of hours but when you get to some very big areas it gets really ugly. Even the map screen tears when you move the map around! Some brief pauses occur from time to time when switching to a different attack or killing an enemy. Add serious aliasing issues to this and you get one of the worst performing high profile games engines of the generation. Even worse than inFamous.
suffer the most from this and are a chore to play. Especially the one occurring in the
which, incidentally, is artistically ugly. These sections are badly designed to begin with, with easy to dispatch enemies coming from the front. Devs were clearly aware of this and they tried to fix it by making some enemies magically appear behind or above you from time to time. It hardly worked cos it just feels unfair.
Yet, overall, game shows effort by devs and considering they are new and all, this being their first game, a sequel might very well turn out as something special. Looking forward to it.