So after two full streams of playing Death’s Gambit and being like one area away from finishing it, i think it’s time to post a smol pleb review on it, in case someone will be wondering if it’s worth buying etc.
So let’s start from the things i don’t like and then move to positive sides of the game. Again i have nothing much to compare and Dead Cells is obviously pretty different game, so will try to just share my opinion without comparing to anything.
First of all dodging, dodging is awful for my taste – you can’t really do “predictive” dodges, like dodging behind the enemy (can’t do it to the side in 2D game obviously) for example anticipating the attack, even when attack is already being charged. Tracking on attacks is just insane, enemies easily turn 180 degrees if you roll behind them, some enemies don’t track that well, but their hitbox goes 360 degrees so even rolling their attack perfectly you can get hit by it standing behind their back (hello Bulwark). Also kinda global lack of stamina during combat makes it harder to manage rolls and i’m not new to stamina management, i’m obviously not amazing at that, but amount of situations when stamina felt really limited during this one playthrough is bigger than in my all experience with souls games, even though i leveled endurance quite a bit.
Other than that i think combat system is fine, but here goes stats and character system – due to rolls being kinda pepo “dex” (Finesse) build already feels kinda bad compared to strength builds with nice stability (Toughness) stat that can block a lot of stuff without losing much stamina. Then you also realize that first good armor items on dex build you will find pretty late into game and amount of dex weapons is pretty limited, while there are lots of strength weapons and loads of strength armor pieces, feels a bit unfair. Can’t say much about magics, items with magic stats feel kinda rare too, you can farm some relatively early, but still rare, also Int weapons are super rare and i don’t think you can get some good drops of those with high upgrade levels (unless i was really unlucky), while other weapons you can get dropped up to +5 in later areas.
Controls aren’t getting saved and UI tooltips are stuck to default controls all the time. PS4 controller getting disconnected or leaving to main menu resets all the controls – super annoying, but not a big deal, shouldn’t be too hard to fix.
I think that is all with negative sides for me, rest is neutral or good, some bullshit enemies like golden knights swinging their swords like some food processor for example, but that’s where parry mechanic comes in handy and actually saves the day, without it i would probably ditch the game feeling gimped with my dex build.
Art is good, story is interesting, even though a bit weird with fantasy/sci-fi mix, but i’m ok with that. Boss design ranges from “ok, regular” to “damn that’s pretty good” so far, so that’s a positive thing of course. All the combat system flaws in my eyes i compensated by managing to make a pretty strong build with lots of finesse (set that you can find is actually really strong in terms of stats), upgraded Spear with bleed skill and Cinder Bow upgraded with rest of materials (so +5), bow puts a burning DoT on enemies that scales with finesse and bow upgrade level and deals a lot of damage. So you have 2 DoTs on enemies and good damage output and with some plumes sacrificed in favor of damage (nice mechanic, pretty cool) you can melt everything really well, with some bosses i just pretty much traded and face tanked quite a bit, so my finesse build became pretty strong and cheesy in the end since fire DoT from the bow is pretty strong and it’s ranged. I would probably wait for sale to be honest and just play more Dead Cells atm or try Salt and Sanctuary instead, but still no regrets, in the end with OP build it’s at least fun to explore and progress, still need to finish it for full story picture, but so far pretty nice, has some philosophical message to it.