Playing a couple of games right now -
For Honor - It's overrated, imo. I find it to be a bit of a slog, and the clunky and unresponsive controls don't help. Every input you make feels delayed, and that's not good, especially when the blocking system relies on you moving the mouse to the right spot. It feels like Mount and Blade or Kingdom come, but worse.
Hellpoint - I got this free from GOG. A lot of people call it a souls like, but I think it's more like bloodborne - you have a quick little dodge, there's an emphasis on aggression and you get guns, except they actually deal damage. It's actually not that bad, I was expecting something a lot more jank. The combat is actually decent and the enemy design is certainly interesting. In terms of level design it's a little hit or miss. On one hand, you have large levels with a lot of hidden treasures that reward exploration. On the other hand, the levels are also convoluted and easy to get lost in, there are a lot of instant death falls and for some unholy reason the devs decided to add platforming, complete with a jump button. Which feels like arse to use because the jumps are floaty.
That's main problem with hellpoint really - there are some good ideas and neat concepts, but they're undermined by the devs obsession with tedium and convolution.
Some examples -
+ There are special doors called Black Hole Doors that unlock at a certain time. These doors have loot (cool idea!)
- However, these doors will not unlock unless you input certain codes at a certain terminal. These codes are scattered throughout the game and are really easy to miss. You can only have a couple of codes active at a time (tedious)
+ The main hub is where you upgrade your weapons, and you need to upgrade your weapons unless you want to get spanked by the game's absurd difficulty spikes (pretty standard for a souls-like, really)
- No way to teleport back to it to prepare for a boss, unless you have an extremely rare, one use item, meaning that you have to be extremely careful about what breach to use it on (well that's bullshit)
+ You get a lot of damage types and weapons have abilities that unlock the more you use them (cool idea!)
- No way to actually see what the damage types do or what abilities you've unlocked because the inventory UI is crap (well shit)
+ Health items recharge when you deal damage in melee (neat idea, encourages getting stuck in)
- By the time you recharge a use the fight is over because the leech value tends to be pretty low (goddammit...at least energy recharges fast so you can just shoot everything)
+ Huge areas with lots of secrets and loot (great!)
- They all look the same, with grey metal walls and poor lighting (of fucking course)
You get the idea. It's not a terrible game and is passable, but it's held back by some rather awkward ideas. To use a crude analogy, it's like Dark Souls II, but without a budget, without polish and made by the French (well, French-Canadians, but close enough)
