You should consider buying this game if you enjoy challenging survival games with a heavy emphasis on action and where you can play an ambitious vampire in a quest to drink basically everyone tasty enough in the lands, up until the final boss: Dracula himself.
The gameplay's loop is fairly standard for the genre: you gather resources, you build yourself a nice castle (where you can craft/upgrade), you equip yourself with your flashy new weapons, you hunt down some bosses to unlock new recipes. Repeat.
Pros:
- The graphics are fine and the game's aesthetic has its charm.
- If you enjoy a challenge, the game will give you one, especially if you play blind directly on Brutal difficulty.
- There are tons of bosses. I got tired of hunting them down way before reaching the last 5 ones.
- You don't need to grind that much compared to other survival games (it is relative tho, and depends on your previous experiences with this genre, ofc).
- You can build a good-looking castle/garden with ease. It won't require that many resources.
- Tons of magical powers to unlock (you get them by killing bosses). They will help you adapt to the wide variety of bosses you will face (they can be swapped, even mid combat :P).
- A wide variety of weapon types.
- Quite a few travel forms and means of transportation (I won't spoil them).
- The servant system, to help you gather resources.
Cons:
- Meh musics. There aren't that many of them (and boss battles all share the same theme...).
- Blood drinking. At first, it won't bother you, as you will just drink whatever mob crosses your path. But when you discover how potent 90-100%quality blood types are... you will want to drink it exclusively for boss fights. The problem is that your blood pool diminishes when you cast/transform/regenerate (so basically all of your main actions aside from attacking with weapons and crafting lol). In practice, you will be drinking quite often from the highest blood types available to you, which means going back to your castle to drink the blood from your captured victims. It's not fun: it's a chore, especially after a full playthrough (THE GAME IS LONG).
- The sun. I know, "we are vampires in a survival game, ofc the sun should have a great impact". I agree, this mechanic (if you stay 20+ seconds exposed to the sun, you will take massive damage) is interesting and forces you to either fight during the night or to jump from shadow to shadow. The problem is that many tough bosses are not in-door --> they are exposed to the sun during daytime! It means that you have to wait irl minutes for nighttime to come. So not only do you have to backtrack to where you died, but you also need to wait for the night before attempting that outdoor boss again! It doesn't sound like much but, trust me, in a game with so many challenging bosses, you will start being annoyed by how many "daytime alt tab breaks at the teleporting gateway" you need to take.
- If you have played mmos like WoW, or played the SoulsBorne series (including Sekiroh and ER), you won't be impressed by the bosses' design. Some are fun challenges (like Simon Belmont), but others are quite literally chores. Take the old man in the cursed forest for example: he flees from you while aggroing the annoying mobs of the annoyingly thick forest.
- Adds. While Elden Ring became infamous for its sometimes ridiculous boss attack delays, this here game has bosses summoning adds/making clones of themselves way too often. When the hardest part of a boss is its add phase (multiple of them sometimes, if you don't kill the boss fast enough), and when you have add phases on so many bosses, it starts to get annoying.
- AoE clutter. It keeps you on your toes and forces you to better position yourself, but sometimes it can become quite ridiculous when the attack indicators pile up onto each others WHILE SOME ADD IS CHARGING AT YOU.
That's it. Despite my complaints, I recommend that game.
TL;DR: a challenging experience that I didn't find particularly enjoyable. Some might greatly enjoy that game for its many qualities tho, so don't be afraid to give it a go.
