This is a competent souls like. It feels solid enough. Anyone who enjoys the genre will find some fun here. Some...

I had my most fun with the start of the game, but as the game opened up I started to feel underwhelmed with the areas and enemies. It's been a few months and I can't remember anything about the second half of the game. >_<)

If you need a souls fix this isn't a bad choice, but it definitely isn't for everyone.

Un quiero y no puedo constante de juego. Tiene muy buenas ideas, algunas las sabe ejecutar muy bien pero otras, sin embargo, son un verdadero desastre. De verdad que me sorprende sobremanera que tenga tantas reviews positivas cuando a mí me ha parecido un juego tan mediocre y olvidable, y mira que he intentado que me guste, pero hay una serie de puntos negativos que quiero resaltar porque me parece completamente absurdo.

Para empezar, ¿por qué el plataformeo parece sacado de la Play 1? Saltos y movimientos extremadamente toscos; las plataformas a veces no captan bien el borde y te caes aunque hayas llegado; zonas extremadamente difíciles y enrevesadas para no recibir ningún tipo de recompensa o algo demasiado básico para estar tan escondido... Un verdadero desastre. Podría decirse que en todos los Souls son un desastre, pero ¿por qué este juego tiene que cometer los mismos errores? ¿Por qué no es capaz de enmendar los errores que ya saben que cometen los juegos a los que está copiando? Además de que tenemos un botón de salto que se podría haber implementado mucho mejor.

Una de las mejores experiencias de los juegos estilo Souls son los jefes. Combates frenéticos, difíciles, en los que tienes que buscar el punto débil o adaptarte al estilo de lucha. Pues en este juego todos los bosses contra los que te enfrentas más adelante en la aventura serán enemigos normales. Tócate, los ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, Mari Loli. No sólo me parece muy vago por parte de los desarrolladores no haber creado otros tipos de enemigo para cubrir esos puestos, sino que encima le quitan toda la presencia y la emoción a los combates de jefe de zona. Sólo hay 4/5 combates contra enemigos que no volvemos a ver en ninguna parte y que tienen una gran importancia narrativa, el resto son completamente banales e irrelevantes, simples obstáculos en nuestro camino.

Y por último, el sistema de combate. Contra los enemigos normales parece que va bien, fluido, diferentes movesets para diferentes tipos de arma, las armas a distancia son las que sustituyen a la magia en este juego en cuanto a viabilidad... Pero todo cambia cuando llegas a los jefes. Hitboxes inexistentes, atraviesan paredes, obstáculos del escenario, a veces golpeas en zona acertada y no cuenta como golpe válido... Un verdadero desastre.

Es una verdadera lástima que este juego me haya decepcionado de esta manera, porque encima fue un regalo de cumpleaños, y es una temática y estilo de juego que era un acierto absoluto.

I've greatly enjoyed my time with Hellpoint. It's the one soulslike I've played to have exploration comparable to DS1 and DS2, and that's where Hellpoint really shines. Irid Novo has a multitude of branching and looping paths with plenty of secrets to uncover. There's even a handful of "sequence-breaks" built into the map if you're thorough enough.
Combat is serviceable, but bossfights are comparably lackluster when the Souls meta-series is the primary metric, and sadly online co-op had severe de-sync issues last I tried it. My sole other primary complaint is that a few rooms felt unduly spartan. There's one side-room I particularly remember from the Archives that felt unfurnished and unfinished, almost like a placeholder.
Besides all of that Hellpoint deserves some real praise for including LOCAL SPLITSCREEN CO-OP, and on PC no less!
I'm looking forwards to someday doing a full run in said local co-op.

"One would be ill-advised to consume this in its current state, or its original"

I backed this game on Kickstarter; after playing the pre-alpha demo on the campaign's page, I asked myself "would I actually want to play a whole game like this?" The answer was, and is, yeah, sure. I bought another copy of the game to play on console. I really wanted to like it. I posted on both the discord server and the forum (which was basically dead because the discord exists).

For most of the game's development, periodically checking out the alpha and beta versions of the game was a kind of tug-of-war between how much of the game was technically finished and how much of it was mechanically finished. I would usually either find myself unable to progress early on because of glitches, or be able to explore well into late-game areas because the lock-and-key progression simply hadn't been set up or finalized yet. I bring this up not as a criticism, but just to make clear that while I haven't gotten very far in the final release of the game, I have seen most of the content on offer here, even if I don't have a real grasp on how it's been structured. Though I will point out there are some aspects of the pre-release versions that I preferred.

The game leaves a terrible first impression. Graphics settings are becoming more common in console games, but it's pretty unusual for a console game to not only have V-sync options, but to disable it by default. The narrative presentation being entirely in text and gibberish voice acting becomes a lot more acceptable once you actually find characters in the world to talk to, but when it's just a disembodied voice it feels really cheap. The tutorial's exit is gated by a boss that has way too much health, does way too much damage, and inflicts a status ailment if you're too close to it. The opening area does have a number of side-paths where you can gather more experience (Axions), and find more specialized weapons (a dagger for dexterity builds, a concrete slab for strength users), but there is no decent armor anywhere in the tutorial. The strangest part is that in one of the pre-release versions, there was an armor set in one of those side-paths, and I have no idea what made them change that.

The fact that levels are separated by loading screens rather than being a single continuous world (as in the Souls games that inspired it) is both a blessing and a curse. The biggest upside is that once the game opens up, the world is very interconnected, since they don't necessarily need to worry about how it would all logically fit together. The obvious side effect of this is that the game does not logically fit together, and it's basically impossible to form a mental map of the more labyrinthine areas of the game. Not to mention that it just feels kind of cheap, even if I can mostly excuse that since this is the first game from a new, small studio.

The general game-feel is mostly solid, I think it's the closest anyone has gotten yet to making a game feel like a From game (even if they sure as hell haven't captured the aesthetics). Combat is pretty engaging once you get far enough to start upgrading and customizing your weapons, but until that point it's a slog. Platforming isn't exactly one of the game's strengths, but it's definitely interesting to see a Souls-style game with a heavy emphasis on such mechanics. The platforming section in the observatory is very effective at showing off both its strengths and weaknesses; sliding up and down the vertical rails is fun, basic traversal is fine, anything that requires precision or mid-air control is a crapshoot. In of the pre-release builds, doing a light attack in midair functioned similar to an air-dash, but from what I remember it was stiff enough that it didn't help much with precision.

The art direction is one of the weakest areas of the game. Some enemies straight up look like a Zeon Zaku, one of the bosses looks like alien Dhalsim, there's an entire faction and area with a gold art-deco aesthetic; I don't actually know whether or not they made their character models in-house, but I could easily believe that every single piece of art in the game was purchased on an asset store. Most of the game is grey metal hallways, and half the time doors are completely indistinguishable from the walls that surround them. The death screen is genuinely embarrassing to look at, it's the kind of thing I would expect to see in a 2010 mobile game.

Despite everything there are small bits of the game I appreciate. The first time I saw areas like the Sohn District and Arisen Dominion I felt like the level design was strong enough that this game had real potential, if they could pull everything together. The amount of branching paths and the weird world-tendency-esque systems make it feel like there's a lot to uncover, even if a lot of it is more of the same. It seems like most of the major players at Cradle are former Ubisoft people, and if this is what they want to do and it's working out for them then I definitely think it's for the better, and I want to see what they do next, but I don't think this is a particularly strong start.

If you're somehow just absolutely starving for more Souls, you might get something out of this. I'd say most people won't.

A soulslike that focus on exploration over combat.

If what attracts you from this genre is the tight controls, learn the enemies and everything related to that, then this game will be mediocre or unpolished.

Where this game truly shines is the enviroments, secrets and lore. This is its main hook, it presents riddles that are easily solvable to some (1 that is actually a few) of the hardest in any soulslike.