I have ended my playthrough with some mixed feelings. I have had a good time with the game, but also got quite bored with it after about 37 hours. The game starts out quite slowly with some mundane missions and story telling, where it is trying to set up the world and the narrative. I enjoyed trying to do some side quests as I tried to figure out the time limit that immediately makes itself known. For those that do not know, the game features a limited time mechanic where the day is split into a day and night cycle. Each cycle has 8 segments in it and doing quests, looting (some) chests, leveling up and advancing the story will all use up these segments. The most I have ever seen a quest take up is 4 segments. This mechanic was controversial when the game was not yet released, but I feel like people over reacted to it. It's not that bad, you can get a whole lot done before time advances. The only part where I felt it wasn't quite right was when leveling up. You can only level up at a shrine and since I didn't really stop at shrines often, I would find myself with 5 to 10 perk points whenever I did finally decide to go for a level up. This means that sometimes I would find myself at a shrine in the early morning, level up Coen and end up at midnight again. This feels like I was needlessly punished for getting stronger. Besides this, I don't think that the time mechanic actually truly adds to the enjoyment of the game. There was not a single moment where I actively enjoyed it. For the most part it was just there and I was pretty indifferent to it.
You can get a lot done with the time you have. In fact, I still had 12 days left when I decided to advance to the final mission. I just got incredibly bored with the gameplay. The combat is.. well it's not good enough to keep the player engaged for the amount of time you have to deal with it in order to explore the valley, do the side quests and activities and advance the story. There is not enough enemy variety and many of the different enemies still use a lot of the same mechanics. There's so many different enemies that just teleport around during a fight, either by truly teleporting or by burrowing underground and then popping up a few meters back. It's annoying. The lock on system is also annoying as it doesn't really respond well to your input and on its own it doesn't really know which enemy to target. The combat is made a bit more bearable with the parry and dodge system where you need to dodge or block in the direction the attack is coming from in order to perform a perfect dodge or a parry. You can then create an opening to strike. You can level up the abilities that would allow for a perfect repost if you perfect block or dodge into a parry or strike where you will do an automatic critical hit. Some fights, where you're truly in the flow of combat and you continue to parry and dodge while taking out a group of enemies, truly feels good. But there is probably a lot more the devs could have done with the combat to make it a lot more interesting. As it is, you have a single button for all your attacks and besides the directional combat and the abilities Coen has, there isn't anything else to it. I played the game on the [i]challenging[/i] difficulty setting, but found that it was too easy for most of the time. The only time where it got difficult was when I found myself in a high level area where multiple enemies with a red skull next to their healthbar would attack at once. Because the lock on system is so poor, getting through fights with many enemies at the same time without taking any damage is nearly impossible.
The exploration within this game is probably its strongest point. I really enjoyed how just being curious would lead me to interesting locations where I would be able to learn about the lore of the world, its history, the previous heroes and about Coen himself as well. At one point I was trying to get to a tower at night because it is a vantage point (Assassin's Creed tower) that allows you to see the map and unlock icons on it. There are many of these towers spread throughout the world, but this one was different. While ascending the tower I found myself unraveling a mystery on my way to the top that eventually lead me to learning more about Coen's history and his relationship with his father and his siblings. It was truly well done. Similar moments happened where I was trying to get to yet another vantage point, only to find myself being able to enter the building I was climbing to find one of the Bakir's inside of it. I was even able to challenge it (and defeat it) far before you're actually supposed to. This really makes the exploration rewarding. The game also responds to this type of exploration appropriately where the story has you discover something you have already found by exploring and Coen then saying that he has already found this or knows about it. The story and lore of the game is really interesting and the writing is good for most of it. I do want to learn more about the lore and the history of this world, but the gameplay simply isn't good enough to keep me engaged. I may return to the save I made before setting the final mission in motion, but for now I need a break from the gameplay.
The performance of the game was not too bad for me. I have had a few frame drops, mostly during cutscenes, but other than that it was pretty stable. The game is very buggy though, especially visual bugs are all over the place. Every cutscene would have the game struggle. I suspect that it is because of my resolution, I play at 5120x1440, but the cutscenes are in 3440x1440. The game seems to try and stretch the image to 5120x1440 during these cutscenes with flickering video images as a result. This happens every time Coen starts a conversation with someone and it truly breaks the immersion.
I have seen some people compare the game to The Witcher 3, even calling it a spiritual successor, but that's not really true. It took some inspiration from it, but it's far removed from the quality of The Witcher 3, That game is a 9.5/10 while this game is a 7.5/10, maybe an 8 if some of the bugs get patrched out.
