Sekiro Shadows Die Twice

This game has a pretty big fan-following and many people really like it

…but after playing it, I’m not one of them, and I’ll explain why.

The game is interesting in the sense that you play as a Ninja with Dark Souls-style type gameplay, but that’s about where its good traits end.

The gameplay is incredibly unbalanced. The game forces you to rely on a fighting system known as a “posture” system in which you attack and counter in order to break your opponent’s posture to inflict damage on them. This is an interesting fighting system in theory, but in practice, it’s incredibly difficult to time your parries exactly right in order to break your opponents’ posture. Your vain attempts at timing your parries result in your own posture being broken, causing you to stagger and leaving you open to your opponents’ attacks. On top of it, not all attacks can be parried. Power attacks need to be dodged, and you need to jump over sweeping attacks. You can’t have more than a few missteps in combat before you’re taking massive damage and dying within seconds.

That brings me to the RPG elements (as most Souls games are known for that). In this game, there’s very little. You can unlock more abilities like sword combos, increasing attack power, and getting attachments for your prosthetic, but these end up doing very little to help you in combat, and the only way to increase your max health is to collect four prayer beads by defeating mini-bosses, but, like many other RPG elements in this game, you’ll find that increasing your maximum health does very little to help as your attacks do very little damage against your enemies where most of your enemies can kill you in a few hits.

As you can tell from my explanation of the RPG elements, this game doesn’t really reward you for accomplishing difficult tasks in the game. One of the main draws of Souls games like “Demons’ Souls” the “Dark Souls” games, and even “Bloodbourne” was the high difficulty, but once you actually accomplish defeating a difficult boss, you are rewarded with useful items. This is mostly absent in Sekiro in which the rewards you receive are mildly helpful at best. At least, in most Souls games, if you are met with a difficult challenge, you can level yourself up more in other areas of the game and come back later. In this game, you need to memorize every single move every single enemy does and how to counter it or you’re not going anywhere. My guess is this was the developers’ naive attempt at making the game “realistic”, but in this, they fail. In an actual fight, if you memorize every single move your opponent makes and how to counter it, a good fighter catches on to this, and changes their tactic.

In conclusion, this game was a good attempt, but it feels rushed, and I think they could’ve benefited from a few more months of development and testing. I do not recommend it

You’re welcome. I’m just glad I was able to spare someone else the disappointment I felt playing it. Let me know how Nioh 2 is. I have yet to play it