tails of iron is a decent whiff of an action game, with a multitude of incredibly baffling design decisions that make the experience more frustrating than enjoyable.
the game is very pretty. this is it's best quality by far
the game does a lot of things poorly, but the game is at it's second best during the boss fights. at it's core, the combat wants to be a blend of 2d action games and souls games. the combat is kind of reminiscent of sekiro, if there were more emphasis on jumping over sweeps and mikiri counters. there's parries telegraphed by a yellow 'parry this' sparkle, dodges telegraphed by a red 'dodge this' sparkle, rolls telegraphed by a pinkish circle, and blocks telegraphed by a white 'block this' sparkle. also dodging is different than rolling. kind of.
the main problem with this system is that it's incredibly misleading. the game doesn't actually have any checks for attacks besides 'cannot be blocked' and 'cannot be blocked or parried'. the red sparkle 'dodge' telegraph is mechanically identical to the pink circle one. there's no i-frames. if you got hit by a roll telegraph when you dodged and thought that you got hit because you took the wrong action, you'd be wrong; the only thing that matters for either is getting out of the way of the attack.
that would be fine, but even when you're not getting hit, the movement and combat are just not very satisfying. it's hard to tell how bad it really is without playing the game yourself, but the game feel is just way off. your character takes what feels like several hundred milliseconds just to turn around. there's also a long pause after dashing. it makes the combat feel really unrewarding when you successfully dodge an attack string, only to be animation locked for so long that you can't actually get a hit on the boss. this is exacerbated by the fact that the bosses tend to fly around the entire screen a bunch, and the player character is slow as molasses. one really stupid thing is that sheathing your weapon (with d-pad up, god forbid) is functionally instant and gives you a huge speed boost, so optimal play is generally to dodge and then sheath your weapon, so you can run across the screen to the boss faster so you can actually land a hit on them. it's very, very clunky. a lot of bosses also have some type of move where they jump away while invincible. this is really annoying; just give them more hp instead of making attacks just whiff right through them. a lot of enemies (not just bosses) do a very annoying thing where they have a sparkle telegraph, but they don't actually do an attack, they fly up to you and do another telegraph, and then attack. combined with telegraphs that hit cross-screen and don't double-telegraph, this is really annoying. parrying is also weirdly unsatisfying. even if you land a parry, the parry will often throw the boss so far you have to run up to get a hit on them. in some cases you can't even get a hit; there's at least one boss that will literally just get parried, and then fly away while invincible if you try to hit them while they're knocked down. to add to the suffering, telegraphs are rendered behind foreground scenery, frequently making them completely invisible. one of the more egregious things the game does is turn to greyscale when you have low hp. this would not be a problem, but the parry-attack and the dodge-attack sparkle telegraphs differ only by color, leading to situations where you literally cannot tell if you need to parry or dodge an attack because you are low on health.
so that's the best it gets. i truly think that the combat is really, really close to being satisfying, and with a little better game design, this would be a decent to good game and an easy recommend for people who like this style of gameplay. unfortunately the rest of the game is kind of a dumpster fire of quality of life issues. i want to really drive home how much of a frustrating experience this game was at every other moment, so i'll write this out in list form.
-you have to save manually at benches. there are no autosaves. i am of the opinion that every game should at least autosave
-dying rolls you back to your last save. didn't take the time save at a bench while backtracking and die in a new ambush combat? you're redoing everything you did before last bench, down to picking up items and progressing town quests. this leads to weird situations where you finish a tough combat, and then backtrack just so you can save so you don't have to redo it.
-saving doesn't refill your estus-equivalent, nor does it refill your health. so when you backtrack to save, you also have to backtrack to a different location to refill your estus. also, you want to refill your estus first, because if you save first and die, you'll have to go refill your estus again
-refilling your estus doesn't heal you. so when you you backtrack to refill your health, you're actually refilling your estus, drinking it (which is agonizingly slow in this game), and then refilling your estus again
-refilling your arrows and poison are also different interactables, often in different locations than benches and estus refills
-as a general rule of thumb, interacting with anything in this game takes several seconds at a minimum. looting grubs is especially egregious in this regard
-interactable zones are just a tad too small and misplaced. often times, being moderately close to an object will be out of the zone, forcing you to turn around, back up, and turn around again to interact with it
i'm not sure if i've yet stressed just how awful restocking after any hard combat is, but i would describe it as miserable. let's continue.
-fall damage is not threatening, but annoying. falling from any height above jumping height will deal a tiny chunk of damage to you. it's just enough that you would want to refill your estus from it before a boss.
-there's a ton of backtracking. not just for restocking, but the """side""" quests (a lot of the early ones are actually just straight up required) frequently send you back to the same area half a dozen or so times.
-travel is really boring. there's not much to do besides hold the control stick left or right while backtracking, unless...
-the game has a few vines and breakables. these take a huge number of swings to clear. multiple of them require 3 fully charged heavy attacks to get by. and if that weren't annoying enough, they all FULLY RESPAWN IF YOU LEAVE THE AREA
-there is frequently no point to exploring, since a quest will generally send you to a location on the map at some point anyways, and often times an area will have literally nothing in it if you don't have the right quest
-no world map
-the music fades out, and then back in on any screen transition
-executes happen automatically on enemy kills mid combat, as opposed to manually, like how it is on bosses, or only on the last enemy in a combat. enemies also do not stop attacking while the execute animation is playing, frequently leading to situations where your character will automatically execute an enemy, and then put you directly in the path of an unblockable attack.
so what's in the game is very frustrating for the most part, but the game also has two very obvious lost opportunities. one is that the gearing is really uninteresting. there's not a single piece of armor that has multiple resists; every single piece of armor has zero or one resistance on it. every other piece of gear has at most, two stats on it; shields/helmets have weight and armor, weapons have weight and attack. nothing else. it's wildly uninspired
the second is that the game has shockingly little story and lore. given how pretty this game is and just how much narration there is, it's really sad that 95% of it is just puns and one-liners. they could have really done something with it. instead, the story boils down to 'frogs are evil, just go kill them so they don't kill us again'
