Status: Recommended
Hours Played: 36.6 hrs on record
Published: 27 December, 2021. Last edited 27 December, 2021
Slightly better combat than Dark Souls and definitely nowhere near as buggy. Here a wall is a wall and no melee attacks will clip through it (you still can shoot lasers with your drone through walls though but more often than not it is useless) and everytime you fail you will know it was your fault.
Combat leave less randomized drops than Dark Souls: everytime you face an enemy you'll know what he'll potentially drop, should it be weapon or armor. In that sense it makes it more predictable than Dark Souls, which might be a bad thing. On the other hand combat is a little more complex, which makes it more interesting to me (and the fact that enemies can't kill you through walls but neither can you).
Edit: something that I did find very annoying is the combat, which is DESIGNED to be 1v1. Do not enter a fight against 2 enemies or you might be f*cked to death. This is very easily avoidable though, since you can poke enemies to make them walk towards you. But you cannot easily switch between 2 different targets in a fight because the lock-on focuses on enemies limbs, instead of enemies as a whole. Anyway, unless you like evading all across the room you should be fine.
Another thing to mention is non-human bosses: some weak spots have terrible hitboxes, so sometimes your hits won't register correctly. Yes, this is very infuriating and made me repeat the first 2 bosses many times until I got a good grasp of what was happening and why. They're quite simple, though.
Level Design is more compact than Dark Souls, since there's only one bonfire per zone/level and several paths that depart from/lead to the same bonfire. However, this game is much more scripted than any Dark Souls so only one path is available when you get to a new zone and shortcuts are unlocked only after you do certain actions in each level. Again, this makes the game much more linear than Dark Souls and won't let you beat the game with a lvl 1 character, for instance. I still found it perplexing how well designed the paths were.
Some aspects are better, some worse, and other just diferent than Dark Souls. Don't expect everything to have a translation 1:1 though. They're different enough and this game is still worth trying
Solid recommend.