How can you fail at making a hack and slash game?
I didn't really have high hopes for this game when I went in to it, but I never imagined for one second that it could be this bad.
"What’s so bad about it?" I hear you cry, or not as no one cares, well let me tell you. First of all the most basic and fundamental thing that you should get right when making a Hack and Slash game.... the hacking and the slashing, the hit detection in this game is pretty awful, I mean it's ok for you attacking normal enemies and even them attacking you back, but sometimes attacks that certain enemies do can hurt you for a LOT of damage, an amount of damage that just seems disproportionate to the rest of the game. A big annoyance of mine as well was that if a boss blocked his front with a weapon, even hitting him on the back had the same effect as the front, so if he was in a guarded mode, he could be there FOREVER...
There is also a tiiiiny collection of characters with only ONE available from the start, while the rest have to be unlocked by completing her story, this wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't for the fact that they’re basically is no story, or a very limited grasp on a story, every now and then you'll be stopped from fighting to watch a very brief bit of dialogue between two characters (some of which are never explained who they are or what they are doing there) before being thrown back into battle.
Another major problem with this game is the level lengths, while you'll only see about 5 or 6 different levels repeated for the 6 different characters with slightly varying goals, they can last from anything up to 15 minutes to 35 minutes, and all of this must be done without any checkpoints what so ever. No checkpoints? No big deal right? Well, no it is a big deal when the difficulty of enemies Yo-Yo's up and down within the level so that one minute you can be doing fine and the next clinging on for dear life, and the amount of times I lost to the last boss of a level and had to redo another 30-40 minutes of hacking and slashing is off the chart, while none of your progress is saved at all.
At the end of the day, it's nice to see a new comer in this rather one sided genre, but from this first impression I don't want a sequel, so if you really have the urge to hack and slash please go and pick up a copy of Dynasty Warriors, sure it hasn't changed at all in about 5 sequels but at least it's rather old and bland formula is a solid one rather than this washy mess of crap.
