En Garde!

It's quite hard for me to rate this game. Looking at the gameplay trailer, I knew perfectly well that this wouldn't be a polished experience like Sekiro, for example, but I bought it nonetheless. I value a challenge, so I only played expert mode from start to finish. Most of the fights were fine and some were even enjoyable, but there are a few things that rather enraged me: - The controls are decent most of the time, but when encountering multiple enemies, your character's target is sometimes unpredictable and changes just as you press attack. - Boss fights are alright once you figure them out, but this game really suffers from add-spawn-spammeritis. This was incredibly infuriating, especially during the final battle. I spent well over 70% of the fight running away, trying to create an opening, and isolating enemies. - Instances of small-room fights against multiple enemies are just terrible design. This is partly because of the camera, which moves into an advantageous position like a 90-year-old grandma after sitting on the couch for 7 hours straight. - All the points above are mainly nerve-wrecking because of one fact: unlike in most games, enemies all attack at once and don't play chicken. This might be more realistic (considering they are trained soldiers) than the NPC behavior in an Assassin's Creed game, but it isn't necessarily better gameplay-wise. It forces you to engage with the crowd-control mechanics provided by the environment, which is perfectly fine until you run out of said environment. Other than combat: Soundtrack and visuals are good and match the atmosphere, but nothing majorly impressive. I enjoyed the voice acting though. All characters sounded unique and matched their characters. I also liked how soldiers you defeated kept talking while lying on the ground after you finished the arena. between arenas and boss fights there are platforming sections which are mainly there to provide text snippets for lore and story, but sometimes there are just empty platforming sections and they are.... there. They arent challanging or particulary fun and you do not lose anything when failing. They just put a break between fights and thats that. Would I recommend this game? For the original price, probably not. It is a short experience, and it's flawed. It is an okay game, and I like the lighthearted humor, but it could be better. When I finished the game after about 6 h I was glad it was over, which is not a good sign. On sale, it's a reasonable purchase if you like combat games with parry mechanics. I really only bought it because it was in a bundle with Sifu and on sale. 6.8/10 – Will most likely not play again.