Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints

Can you elaborate more on the shittiness of Bloodstained?

Here’s a playthrough for context:

Kicks have startup, so you can’t spam them as much as short swords in previous games. Too short of a hop and you won’t get the kick to come out. Though you can totally spam the sword, so whatever. I actually beat the demo with just kicks, for some reason I didn’t realize there was a sword, That probably would have made it even easier than it already was.

I mean in terms of enemy design, just look at how many times he gets hit in this demo. It’s not many. The dullahammers are the most dangerous enemy here, but only because you can’t spam attacks at them and actually need to back up after they spin the hammer. So move in, attack, move out, wait, move in, etc. Super super simple and disappointing.

I don’t like that soul drops are randomized, adding another thing to grind, but I do love the concept of souls honestly, having a unique attack on every unique enemy in the game. Glyphs were better though, since you could absorb them and usually didn’t need to farm randomly.

I like the fire cannon ability, it makes use of the twin stick controller which is kind of neat.

But really the thing dragging this all down is still the enemy designs and level design. You have enemies that are slow, slowly move at you, low health, and levels that are big hallways with enemies just sort of placed in your way, without trying to combine the two to make a greater challenge. Maybe they went easy, because it’s an E3 demo and journos are bad at games, but who really knows?

The Buers positioned up ledges are like the only thing that’s remotely taking advantage of enemy positioning in this demo.

Oh, and the backdash cancel into attack or crouch is cool too.

Boss is nothing special. Pretty unfortunate. Doesn’t look like it’s trying to take any inspiration from classicvania or Order of Ecclesia.