Aris has been playing it on AvoidingThePuddle. Its animations are a bit jank and the story pretty disjointed and not great but the gameplay is actually pretty good its basically a ranged Dark Souls, and while veryone gets melee the melee is not nearly as robust as Dark Souls since there are not different movesets for weapons. You can probably play as melee focused and have fun, but it won't be different on any other play through.
This is very much a gunplay game, unlike The Surge which is definitely melee. You regen ammo when you hit the bonfire equivalent.
The zones/maps/opponents are pretty solid. Decent zone design and some are quite large, a good opponent variety with a number of interesting gimics.
As far as RPG aspects is has EXACTLY the RPG aspects of Dark Souls, similar amount of stats like 7 or 8, similar levels i.e. you could get to like 80, the stats do similar things i.e. affect stamina or dodge speed or scaling. The XP system is exactly the same except its called bits instead of souls. You recover your souls/bits in the same manner etc.
This game is not easy. Might be harder than Dark Souls.
Edit: as for that review in Roqua's post I don't put a lot of stock in it, the guy has no idea there are 8 zones so he can't really know about opponent variety. IMO its base mechanics, when ignoring animations, are better than Surge/LotF.
This actually sounds pretty good than. How satisfying are the gunplay mechanics, and what do they compare too? Its been years since I've played a shooter, but I do enjoy a good one.
Well the game is a Third Person Shooter. But its a little ... odd... because its a Souls-clone. I am not sure if they truly compare to anything. You can actually play the game with a mouse if you like, but dodging around with a mouse and keyboard feels janky to me in souls games. However if you use a mouse you can take headshots. That game has a crit system and there are two types of crits, you can shoot something in the back and there is some area that is a crit area or you can shoot stuff in the head. The "backstab" is a larger crit than the headshot.
That video said there is no range difference in the guns but that is definitely wrong. There is a clear difference between a pistol and sniper rifle, its about double and can be triple with the right attachment, but you won't be shooting things from across the map, not at all. Although most of the other guns are pretty similar in range.
The reason this is odd is that there is a lockon function just like in Dark Souls (and many other TP action melee games) when you lock on you might get a head shot if they move weird but probably not, but you can definitely get bakcstab crit shots. The backstab areas can vary widely but are usually in roughly a similar place. The enemies sometimes have some serious tracking depending on what moves they are doing, so getting the back can be hard or easy depending on what they do. Its maybe similar to Dark Souls 3 levels of tracking.
The shooting itself depends on the gun of course but there is basically a loose retical and each gun type has a certain amount of stagger and there is a stat to give you resistance to stagger. So there is a sort of poise system that has a bit more granularity than Souls poise. The gunplay itself is pretty satisfying as a lock on and shoot style of game play but I am not entirely sure about doing it as a free mouse look shooter. I messed around with it for a bit and it seems ok with the right sensitivty. I think I would only play mouse and shoot as a dedicated sniper rifle with a focus on the stat that increase crit damage. Otherwise probably using lockon is better since you need to dodge alot.
I was basically playing around yesterday and seeing if I could run around in the beginning area getting headshots fast enough to be usable and I would basically say that the aiming is such that it does not require pinpoint accuracy per se. Bullets and do miss etc, and if things are moving you do need to lead, but I guess I would say a bullet is actually fairly large abstractly and so are the hit boxes, so if you swing the reticle to the head fast enough and they are not moving too jank you will hit. In general no gun is quite long enough range to worry about things other wise.
For a short range lockon style of gameplay you can miss and do to them moving but you don't need to aim really.
Eventually you can carry 4 guns. So you have some options but I am not that sure there is really a ton of difference between an assault rifle and a sub machinegun. The auto fire weapons feel pretty good as do the shotgun. The special attacks I am not that sure on, I kinda wish they didn't charge up. The sniper special is basically a super crit but you have to hold it down and wait for it to charge and you can miss your shot or they move out of the way for a back stab crit before it goes off which kinda sucks mechanically. The video above shows a fairly accurate view of what the shooting looks like for lock on play. Best thing to do is to watch a stream of it like avoidingthepuddle. Its actually kind of hard to compare it and I am sure people won't like it and others will. Its interesting and fairly fun, but its not like obviously amazing.
The biggest thing to realize is that unlike in Dark Souls running away can get you shot in 90% of encounters. So rushing past everything is not really an option and rushing into things can easily get you killed and not having a plan of escape can make things go downhill much faster than Dark Souls where you could often sprint out of trouble. The game is clearly designed to be more frenetic than Dark Souls more deliverate style it seems to me. There are ambushes and traps all over the place. The fact that its ranged and you seem clearly meant to kill most things in range, means you can use cover and distance more than in Dark Souls. This means your dodging has greater implications since you can dodge to avoid an attack or dodge for distance and still do damage. In Dark Souls dodging for distance means you give up damage. So they have probably made encounters more frenetic and ambushy to account for this. Also they clearly added in opponents meant to pressure ranged characters that don't exist in DS such as the teleporting opponents.
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