- Genre: Action/Adventure
- Platform: PS5
- Also Available On: PC
I’m not sure what I thought this game was and admittedly I was playing this entirely because it’s an Unreal Engine title on PS5, which is relevant to the fact that I’m largely working on console porting projects right now. In my head it was going to be slightly hornier Nier Automata, and I guess that isn’t entirely wrong. However, it’s generally got a much more deliberate combat pace. It’s got segments of ranged combat that feel far more like Doom 3. The boss fights are full of spectacle and challenge without feeling unfair. Frankly, this ended up being a far better game than I was expecting it to be.
A lot of what I’m going to say probably isn’t going to be much of a surprise for this type of game. When combat works the game is phenomenal, but it starts to fall apart when they throw multiple enemies at you. This has been the case for me in pretty much any melee action RPG – God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Breath of the Wild, etc. So many of these games work great in singular combat, but the systems just don’t scale up to multiple enemies. They try to UX their way through it with off-screen enemy indicators and things of that nature, but it really doesn’t work well because the enemies all just kind of attack when they want to, so it becomes dodge and parry spam with very few windows to attack. However, the upside of this is that fights like that don’t generally happen in pivotal moments and they start to give you so many tools to knock out multiple things quickly that it becomes much rarer as the game goes on. At that point, combat then gets into the big 1-on-1 fights where the game really shines.
The core tools at your disposal in a 1-on-1 situation are your two levels of melee attacks, parrying, and dodging. I’m going to ignore that you have guns because they are largely irrelevant to boss fights. The big solo fights end up being an incredible back and forth. You do a bit of damage, dodge/parry your way through an enemy attack pattern, then rush back in for the next set of damage. The style of it reminds me in a lot of ways of a slightly more frantic and over the top version of the Ghost of Tsushima 1-on-1 fights.
What these segments do is put a ton of trust in the player to learn and recognize attack patterns. Tells on basic attacks are super obvious, letting the player really lean into timing things properly. Larger attacks are preceded by color coded UI elements, but they aren’t things that can just be button spammed. For example, a blue enemy attack requires the player to dodge forward to avoid large damage, but if they don’t time it properly they will just eat the damage to the face. Some of these are warnings several seconds ahead of time, so it also really forces some patience into the combat pace where the player just should not be doing anything but paying attention to dodge timing. It’s easy during all of this to get tunnel vision on just doing damage, but the game will absolutely 100-0 your health if you get out of control so pulling back on damage in favor of a patient approach does wonders, and in practice it feels so good when you get chains of parries/dodges right to be rewarded with big damage opportunities.
The other part that really worked into this was how well gearing worked into combat. Traditionally I am awful at melee combat timing. However, the game has gear that extended the timing window for these to allow me to play it a bit more safe. Some gear gave me more shield to allow for a bit of safety. Some gear gave me back health on kills to allow trash segments to just flow better. However, the game absolutely gives you tools if you want to be a glass cannon. Some gear gives huge damage increases in favor of also receiving more damage. Some gear will only allow you to get increased damage if your HP is high. Basically, they give you a bunch of tools to play with and let you mold combat into somewhere you’re comfortable being based on your play style, but it all blends so well into the core set of capabilities that they developed from the start.
The rest of the game kind of just exists but worked well enough to push me forward. The overall plot is a pretty standard post-apocalyptic Earth scenario that isn’t frankly that different from a Horizon Zero Dawn where humanity created smart ass robots that inevitably realized that humans are the problem. Exploration and side quests exist as a way to get more upgrade materials, but for me they were largely there for me to find more optional boss encounters to go enjoy. The environment is mostly the same two sets of desert environments from Nier for exploration and city environments from The Last of Us for linear plot segments but both work well to push their style of game. Basically, the wrappings around combat don’t necessarily boost the game, but they also don’t drag it down.
I completely get if the main character’s outfits turn you off of the game because it can get pretty egregious with some of the options. However, for me it ultimately ended up feeling like an obvious marketing choice than anything else. Once I was in the core of combat, the outfit I had on didn’t matter to me and my focus was on the really good combat in front of me. There is a phenomenal action combat loop here that deserves to be brought into a different setting that isn’t blatantly sexualized, because in a lot of ways it felt like it was cracking the code of making parry/dodge based combat work for someone like me who is typically awful at these games without getting rid of possibilities for people who want to just glass cannon through the game with a completely different play style.
It’s pretty easy to read what I wrote and go “this sounds good, but not great” and that’s probably an accurate description. However, I was expecting the combat to also be good but not great and it so completely exceeded my expectations there. This one just ended up being a huge surprise.
