I will start off by saying that I'm very impressed by what's here, considering that it's a the work of a single core developer, or at least started that way before the "Infinite" release.

Graphically it's certainly a fun title. If you look closely it's easy to spot the rough edges, especially the animations, but the environments and models look cool and the lighting mixed with all of the water everywhere gives the eye plenty of natural enough looking detail to gush over. Basically, it's very shiny, with at least enough substance that you don't care to poke any deeper.

Gameplay is the hit and miss part for me. Some tools and elements feel nice, fluid, impactful. Most are rather easy to stress out. Like I've mentioned with Sekiro, I have a way of playing action games that makes certain character-controllers very... grumpy. If I kept things tame it all worked pretty well and mowing down the grunts and special enemies was a fairly satisfying process.

When I tried to sprint-cancel-power-slash spam while jumping and dodging, then it started get hissy with me and eating my inputs because the input state-machine wasn't quite ready for me, even though the visual feedback said otherwise. The movement also had a tendency to react poorly to mid-air collisions and landing on props, and the relationship between dodging mid-air and inertia was sometimes a bit iffy.

I'm a bit picky on the movement as well, because this was a game with rather short times-to-kill and rather simple enemy engagements, so a lot of my focus was on getting from enemy to enemy as fluidly as I could.

The arsenal you're given is perhaps a bit overkill. Namely, the sword can send out cutting waves with high damage and fairly high range, and with a couple other additional moves you can tack on, the guns are just kind of there most of the time. They feel fine and they're not useless, but I tended to only use them when either I just needed to take a few potshots while waiting for the plentiful exo-energy to regen a bit, or on the rare occasion that an enemy was just too far away.

This would be more of a negative, but the sword is admittedly quite fun to use and this isn't a competitive shooter, so there being superfluous options doesn't matter until the combat is actually boring, in my opinion.

What I will say is that I'm not big on how they implemented the controls for the sword combos. They're probably just fine for most, but I found a few inputs a little counter-productive to the types of movement you'd want to pair them with. i.e. Holding 'E' performs a forward dash attack, while the charge attack (which is ranged) is started by sprinting forward and holding 'E.' So there was a lot of straffing backwards only to dash right back into whatever hazard I was trying to avoid.

Overall, though, I would say the gameplay was fun. Flawed, but in forgivable ways.

I have no idea what was going on with the story, so nothing much to say there. But that's set dressing in a game like this. It sets the mood and has no intention of provoking some kind of deep thought beyond, "Woah, that's kinda wild looking. Guess I'm going here now."

The game is rather short as well. Could be a good thing, though. It executed on all of the interesting ideas it had then left when they had nothing more to give. And if you enjoy the combat more than me, I imagine speed running or upping the difficulty gives a litttle extra playtime. There are no long cinematics to get in the way of that.

So if the previews look neat to you, and you can get it for a price you wouldn't worry about, then I can recommend it. If you're looking for only the highest grade shooters, then leave it for now, but if you want a short burst of action game junk food, this will do it.

Reviewed on May 25, 2023


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