The Surge 1 & 2: Mech suit souls-like? Cool, I guess. One hour into the game, I had to navigate through a narrow and dark tunnel with flickering lights. I refunded it immediately. Stupid developers—were they trying to kill people by triggering photosensitive epilepsy and motion sickness at the same time?
If you can't handle flashing lights don't play video games period. DLC is probably worse on this front.
What else? Nioh 1 & 2: While they are good games, like others said, they don't fit in the souls-like genre. After leveling my character above level 10 and unlocking some skills, these games become a totally different beast. Very fast and reward aggression.
Bloodbrorne is not a souls like then?
Is Elden ring not a souls like if I mod it to be faster?
I finished the
Tarnished mod last night and have to say it was a pretty good time. Waiting on the DLC to get updated then I'll play through that. My build was fucking retarded because I kept having to switch up what I used due to enemy weaknesses. So my final load out at level 200 was.
Scholars armament, frozen weapon, ice crag, glint arc and carrian phalanx.
Rellana's Staff on right hand, staff on left hand, a magma dagger that drops pools of lava every hit, Radahn's great bow (Spears for damage, magic arrows to regen MP and holy arrows to regen HP), a flail and a the turtle shield buffed up to be 99% phys block.
My build was completely broken and it was needed for the bosses. They have massive HP pools and it was taking a lot of work to stay alive with some of the new move sets. Adding dodges rather than rolls really speeds the game up but also adds some interesting problems. Since ER is a faggot game where bosses are designed to roll catch and lock on worse than dark souls 2 you soon learned a lot of your dodge windows no longer apply. If you have an extended/faster dodge you could dodge like you would a roll and end up being hit because the boss kept tracking you to your new location and swung then. I focused on being fast and putting down magma pools to control groups of enemies and using the staff/flail to stun lock larger things. Arc was essential to managing how many enemies we were facing. It wasn't uncommon for me to be bowling 20 enemies all together to prevent them rushing us down while my coop partner used AOE weapon arts to keep the mini bosses staggered. It took coordination and team work to survive encounters and when you're attacking a castle or a major choke point you really need to plan what you're doing and pick targets. The new buffed archery applies to enemies as well and they will fuck you up badly if you're not prepared. Expect snipers every where and fuck the cripple bitches with their homing arrows covering narrow paths like a machine gun.
Highly recommend playing with seemless coop if only for the respawning mechanics (turn off coop mods HP pool modifiers. The mod is already balanced for coop and the extra health will make later boss fights take 30 minutes or so). You have to deal with properly fortified locations where 10+ crossbows will target you at once and almost every entry way is blocked by a boss so you can't just skip it. You need to be tactical and even then you will struggle to survive quite often. Chests and doorways being locked behind mini bosses is a great addition to the series. It forces you to engage with the world and the systems. Getting into the capital feels like you're entering a war zone heavily defended not just running past 10 guys and a gargoyle on a leisurely walk. There is a single player version where you get a 30% damage buff but the game is so clearly not designed for it and it would be a lame experience. It's balanced for at least 1 and possibly 3 coop companions. There's very little chance you're surviving fighting 2 lions dropping deathblight while multiple archers and mages attack you from higher areas. And golem archers constantly get put in really nasty places you have to fight your way through to even touch. It feels unfair at first but once you learn what to expect and stop treating it like From's trash you realize just how well put together it is. Difficult, very challenging but very rewarding. I hope future souls likes will take some of the lessons this mod can offer and implement them into future games. Sadly because it's an ultra hard coop mod it doesn't suit streamers and youtubers so it's unlikely to pick up traction. If you have any friends (sorry lyric) install it and seemless coop and have a jolly good time. Limgrave will be a shock but you will adapt and you will get to play with some new combat systems and explore a bunch of new combos (unlike Elden ring base where nothing mixes together, here elemental weapons complement each other and you do have combos you can switch up for different situations).
I'd give it a solid 9/10. It's hard but you always have tools to deal with the difficulty. Shame From are such bad devs they will never see how good this mod is and learn a thing from it. They'll make Demon souls+7 with no additions or changes like they always have and always will.
