Before I get started, just know that this is some very early first impressions in that this is only after the first chapter of 5 (about 2 hours of gameplay) and from a couch co-op perspective so my opinion is prone to change once we finish the game.
Right off the bat, we usually meet up at my friends house to do our couch co-op plays so we did that as usual, popped in the game and updated his PS3 and got ready. Well after about 10 attempts, each resulting in a disk read error we gave up. Although we did buy the game used, the disk itself looked perfectly fine and we tried cleaning the disk and his PS3 before giving up. My friend went and exchanged the game for another copy the next day and so we met up again and had the same results. No idea why this was happening, he has a top loader so we thought just in case to bring my PS3 which is an older slim build and the game worked fine.
So finally being able to jump into this game we got ready but boy were we in for a surprise. The first thing you're greeted by when you get to the title screen is a pretty ugly looking menu and uglier graphics in the background. After a few minutes of trying to find the co-op option when starting the game we gave up and started the game. The prologue loaded up and once the cut-scene was over, we noticed we had only gotten 1 player. My friend said he thought he saw an option to pick co-op in the menu so we went back to the title screen. I picked the same option as before but this time it gave me the choice of doing single player, online co-op, LAN co-op and split screen. After choosing split screen we picked our quest at chapter 1 again and loaded in (did I mention the loading times seem rather long?) and we find ourselves at a new part, not where I had quit out at the prologue. Getting a little frustrated at this point we decide to just play on from here. We took a minute to figure out what buttons did what and then took our first real attempt at the game. Now usually we like to play games on the harder offer difficulties so we had picked "hardcore" for this game. Well 1 minute into the game we found ourselves being bombarded by arrows and dead. Thinking we missed something in the prologue we decided to start over again, loaded the game in single player and my friend played through it on "Casual"; this game's easy difficulty.
Just the prologue was enough to give me an insight of what was to come. Playing on casual I noticed my friend was still having some trouble with the enemies but I just assumed this was on account of it being on 1 player and we're still learning the controls. One thing that really stood out to me while just watching him go through was how much the game just didn't look very pleasing to the eyes and how much the environment seemed to blend in with everything so it always took a bit to figure out what was what.
After the prologue was done we had to go back to the title screen to reload the game in split screen and we decided to play on the medium difficulty. Luckily the game was nice enough to leave us with the item and skill points we had acquired from the prologue. Again we found ourselves at the point where we had fallen on our last attempt and again we found it challenging. I was playing as the archer while my friend the 'tank' and so seeing as there was archers showering us with arrows it was my duty to take them out. As I said before, everything is really bland and blends together so I had trouble even seeing where my enemies are and found myself just covering behind a box or wall, didn't feel very exciting or ARPG to me. If it weren't for auto-aim targeting the enemies for me when I would aim from cover, who knows how much unnecessary damage I'd end up taking.
I really hoped the game would pick up after all these flaws and problems right off the beginning but sadly it did not. The difficulty in this game is very skewed in that even though we are playing on gamer/medium, it feels like it's on a much harder difficulty. I actually managed to go down in what felt like 4 hits from these fast, spiderlike creatures that can jump onto you. Of course these things come in swarms so you're bound to take a couple hits if you find yourself a little low on life and potions before encountering these, chances are you're going to die. Similarly, I can't remember the last game that made me feel so weak.. Sure the most basic of enemies can be killed in 1/2 headshots with the bow, but the stronger enemies just seem to take hits forever before dying. It's pretty discouraging when you're having to hit an enemy 10+ times and they can take you out in 5. With the weird way that enemies can spawn, coming out of dark doorways from your side and back, I found myself getting hit by enemies I didn't even see quite often. Again with the enemies, the archers feel so much better than you are. They have great accuracy, forcing you to play hide and seek with the cover system (seriously annoying for an ARPG) and they fire much faster than you do, not only because of how the bows crosshair takes a second or 2 to tighten again after firing but they just seem able to shoot faster than you and without their crosshairs widening so you can quickly take 2-3 arrows in response to your 1.
Leaving the enemies alone, it was pretty annoying how they give you the option between using weapon skills, and magic, but having both of the use your mana. I would have much preferred there to be a stamina-like bar that your weapon abilities used to fuel them. With how it is now, I don't see myself touching magic just because I seem to have a hard enough time having enough mana to just use my abilities now. On the topic of magic/spells, again the menu is pretty ugly but not only that, the skills/spells are some of the worst, uninspiring I've seen in a while. first you see that you only have 9 spells and 9 abilities to choose from, but it's more like 3 since they are just 3 basic choices and then 2 upgraded versions for each. I found hope for a short bit when I noticed you get 3 upgrades to each ability. As an example I went with the cold arrow first. My 3 upgrades were longer freeze time, mana cost reduction and more cold damage. Cool, I unlocked the 2nd tier of cold arrow which now does area damage (haven't noticed any area damage though) lets see what my 3 upgrades are now? Oh look, mana cost reduction, more cold damage and a splash damage radius increase.. How exciting, I can only guess what the 3rd tier upgrades are. Oh wait, you don't unlock those until the 5 (the last) chapter of the game. Honestly one of the worst skill trees I've seen in a game.
As a bit of a wrap up, here are few more annoying things. No lock on system, this would honestly get rid of the need to rely on autoaim and from my friends complaints, make melee a lot more enjoyable because he found himself missing a lot of swings with the clunky animations and when he is blocking, he can't back pedal at all, he just turns around and exposes his back. Rolling doesn't seem to have any invisibility frames, maybe I'm just too use to dark souls but there doesn't seem to be too much reason to roll in this game. The revive system is one of the worst I've seen, you can only revive a team-mate if you have a revive potion, well you can only carry a certain amount of these, seems like 1 per person. So if your team-mate goes down and you both don't have one (the game is nice enough to drop your team-mates potion at their feet if they had one) then you have to look for one. Well chances are you're busy still killing enemies are you're just not going to find one, so your partner bleeds out and you guys both die and have to go back to the last checkpoint. Strangely if you both go down, you have to wait for one of you to bleed out before retrying, for some reason the game keeps you going even though there's nothing you can do but wait. Ugly. The game is just ugly, nothing is pleasing to look at, animations are ugly and awkward and there seems to be quite a bit of graphical glitches and often I noticed textures not loading until a few seconds later. I expected armor to be much more abundant and exciting. We have both only managed to find 1 piece of armor each and that was within the first 5 minutes of the game. Weapons are unexciting and seem to have a weird 'charge' system where if you get an elemental item, after it has 'proc'd' a certain amount of times, the item loses that element. Arrows aren't unlimited and you can only hold 100. While this isn't a terrible idea, it makes it feel more realistic. I find myself almost always maxed out at 100 and often I find myself hitting a weapon rack hoping to get a weapon or armor and out pops a drop of arrows to add to my already maxed out 100.
As you can see, just after 2 hours of playing the game I had a lot of problems with it. It honestly bothered me when I was looking this game up to see if it would be worth it or not and I saw it being recommended as a good co-op experience and it getting ratings like 6.5+. This was one of the worst gaming experiences I've had in a while and I couldn't see myself giving it anything more than maybe a 3 at this point. I've got a very long list of con's and have yet to see anything to put in the pro's. We'll see how much my opinion changes after me and my friend finally force ourselves to finish the game.
PS. The story is uninspiring and bland as well.
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