Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 19 Sep 2023 23:18
NEOWIZ wrote:Lies of P is a thrilling soulslike that takes the story of Pinocchio, turns it on its head, and sets it against the darkly elegant backdrop of the Belle Epoque era.
by icycalm » 20 Sep 2023 02:27
Darren wrote:Writing this review halfway through NG+.
Takes about 20-25 hours to finish the game, 35-40 hours for completionists. Not necessarily a positive.
Pros:
- Performance is phenomenal, probably the game's strongest point. I get 144fps on a 2080ti at 1080p. No stuttering whatsoever. Every game dev needs to be beat over the head with a copy of this game until it becomes standard.
- Great music.
- Some amazing boss fights. King of Puppets and Nameless Puppet in particular were highlights for me.
- Resource management is fun. Difficult encounters can be brute forced by spending your "Fable"/"Legion" meters, in addition to the usual consumable items.
Cons:
- Run ups to boss gates are needlessly long, reminiscent of Demon's Souls, a 2009 game. Elden Ring did away with this crap. Lies of P regressed over 10 years in this regard. All soulslike devs need to stop this.
- Gank squads are universally hated in every souls game but you get two of them here. Admittedly you only ever get attacked by one of them at a time (unless you walk into range of the others), so you can game the AI a little. But that's not a good thing.
- The game has a time gated currency, like a mobile game or something. You can even buy "boosters" to farm it quicker. It's extremely out of place for a game like this.
- A lot of enemy attack animations are vague. It is often unclear where the active frames in an attack are. For example, a spear wielding enemy running at you with a spear does not actually poke you with the momentum of its run, but with a barely visible pull and stab animation at the end of its run. Pretty frustrating stuff when parrying.
- Something needs to change about the perfect guard mechanic. Right now the reward for engaging with the mechanic is too low to justify its difficulty. Typically in Souls games a parry leads to a riposte, with massive damage being the payoff. Here, you do a little stagger damage. Clearly the intention was to imitate Sekiro's deflect system, but Sekiro deflects are much more forgiving, and reward you relatively quickly. Sekiro's Centipede Giraffe is a great example of this system done correctly. Its multiattack has a distinct pattern that can be deflected relatively easily. Deflecting the entire multiattack is extremely satisfying, and doing it maybe 5-6 times will win you the fight outright. There's nothing like that in Lies of P. Here, your reward for parrying a string of 8 attacks is to watch the boss go into another string of attacks.
- The respec mechanic is at the end of chapter 7, in an 11 chapter game. All the hardest bosses (in my opinion) are before this. Better hope your build is as good as it can be for the first 7 chapters.
- There are tons of things clearly designed to waste your time. For example, levelling up has to be done via an NPC in the game's hub. It can't be done at bonfires. You have to run 30 seconds in one direction to unlock new abilities. 30 seconds in another direction to upgrade weapons. 30 seconds in another direction to pick your mobile game fruit from a tree. I've already mentioned the awful bonfire -> boss gate run ups but it applies here too. An unusually strong enemy will be conveniently placed right before the next bonfire to make it more likely you have to run there multiple times.
- Quirky Marvel-esque quips from your companion cube "Gemini" are really out of place in the otherwise bleak atmosphere.
- Adding Denuvo days before release, and after reviews went out. This review is red because of this alone. Hopefully more reviewers blast anti-consumer publishers.
- The pre-order for early access trend needs to stop.
TL;DR - I would not call this a "worse Bloodborne" - that's too high praise. More like a slightly better Steelrising. It's a good game but if you're into Souls/Soulslike games you'll just be irritated.
TheAxiny wrote:The game is beautiful, but lacks some important polish as far as mechanics are concerned.
It seems like the game wants you to chain parry in a way inspired by Sekiro, but doesn't let you combo into a block from an attack, or vice versa, but imperfect timing leads to chip-damage and soulsian-esque guard-breaks. Learning a boss's move set is forces a slow and methodical rhythm, but the fights themselves demand a fast and aggressive play-style in order to win. Looks great, and is mostly fun. But much of the time, it feels like the game forces you to suffer, rather than forcing you to get better.
You don't get hyperarmor, which makes slow strength builds very annoying to run. No hyperarmor is also a major issue with this game's "groggy" mechanic. It requires you to either perfect parry or pressure the boss until their health bar turns white. It's at this point that if you land a fully charged heavy attack that you can finally land a major blow in the form of a "fatal attack." Bosses can still attack you during the 4~5 second window, and will always interrupt your charge if they connect, as you don't have and can't get hyperarmor.
Just buy it on sale if you really want to play it.
Guy Broman wrote:Not a "true successor" to Bloodborne, they missed the whole point about being aggressive. This is a parry game, which means being defensive and always waiting for the enemy to do their thing first or get hit. Imagine Sekiro without the movement options, you are slower in general, and stance breaking worse. Basic things like recovery roll, quick belt slots, and parrying causing recoil are upgrades you have to use a rare resource on. Shame because it looks very nice and runs well.