Mortal Shell II

Just finished this game, would not recommend. It's got aspirations of being like Lies of P. Some of these bosses have insane combo chains like Arlecchino in the LoP DLC, but unlike LoP this game is janky as hell. Quite a few of the bosses have an attack where they'll spawn projectiles and it's basically luck as to whether you dodge them. I have recordings of me where you can see I'm not being touched by a beam attack and I still I'm being hit. It genuinely does look like you can run away to avoid it because it isn't touching you but the hitbox is way bigger than the beam. There's one attack on a boss where you dodge the projectiles but they glitch out after hitting the floor and carry on tracking you and then you get hit. The final boss has a fire attack that you can clearly run away from but you can't because it still hits you, and if you spam dodge to avoid you still take chip damage from the burn. I don't think there was a single boss the entire game where I wasn't throwing my arms up in the air and being like "THAT HIT ME?" The parry and riposte system is basically worthless in comparison to just spamming your abilities. The bosses get absolutely dumpstered if you use your abilities and it takes no skill. If you try to parry the fights are much harder and your reward is a riposte at the end that does an insultingly low amount of damage most of the time. The animations for the ripostes are brutal as hell, you'll snap their heads off spine and all, beat them to within an inch of their lives with their decapitated head, use their head as a silencer for your shotgun to deliver several gutshots and then go back in time and make their dad wear a condom so they were never conceived and then after all that you've done about the same damage as a single R2. Meanwhile I use an ability once and the boss is gasping for air and begging for mercy. And why is the parry tool with an actual tight window for parrying have a 1 second delay on being able to use it again so you can't parry fast combos with it? The base parry is too forgiving and a snorefest to use but the skillful parry is not a suitable replacement. Also a lot of the arenas are quite big but I still often managed to find myself trapped in a corner with my camera flipping out. The final boss had one of the biggest arenas in the game and at the same time one of the worst cameras. Why do you have to run back so much? I'm not talking about having to run a gauntlet of enemies to retry a fight, I'm talking about a boss with nothing in between you and it but a 30 second run from the bonfire to it. It's such time waste. If there's not gonna be any enemies or obstacles between me and the boss you should just put a bonfire or stake of marika right next to the boss so I can retry it right after dying. We live in a post Elden Ring world. You're making a souls like and let's not cope by saying "well akshually this game is not quite a soulsli-", it's a soulslike. Look at what Fromsoft did, look at how many people were relieved there were no stupid runbacks with nothing in the way and just copy that. Put some enemies in the way or just let me retry the boss without 30 seconds of stalling between attempts. The game is pretty buggy, I actually had to revert to a preview patch branch because one of the hotfixes made me crash when I warped. Before the hotfix I had a memory leak that made my game run progressively worse before that. There's one shortcut gate I must have opened 4-5 times because it kept closing on me for no reason. All this stuff will get patched probably but I'm reviewing the game I played not the game it will be in a year. Why does it cost so much to respec weapons too? I may as well just upgrade a brand new weapon from base than refund. Why do the upgrades cost so much too? It's crazy. It took me 22 hours to beat the game but I feel like the game only really had like 8ish hours of content and the rest of the game was just rehashing the same enemies over and over and over. All this being said, it's a huge step up over Mortal Shell 1. It's a game that I would have rated a 6 or a 7 out of 10 if not for all the problems, instead I give it more like a low 5. It's got potential to be an 8 if the devs knuckle down and start improving the game over the next year. But if I knew what I knew now I wouldn't have bought it in it's current state.