Well, I beat hellpoint. The Sentient and Spawn bossfight is probably the worst designed encounter I've come across. It's as if the developers just gave up and made a boss that is broken in multiple ways.
- If you die you immediately respawn in front of the boss. You have no chance to change equipment or rethink your strategy. If you want some breathing room you have to quit out of the game and it will reload you back at the Embassy. That is tedious. Imagine if in Dark Souls they respawned you right in Ornstein and Smough's boss arena, right into Ornstein's stinger. That's kind of bullshit
-Wide Spanning, hard to dodge attacks that knock you down long enough for an another attack to hit you. Remember the Four Kings, how they can pack a punch and can attack you offscreen? Think that, but even more aggravating because the asshole doesn't have to get into range to attack you and has next to no telegraph. In theory you could shoot the cubes to reduce some of the damage output, but the lock on system in hellpoint is trash and you can't change target. That's right, it's a fucking souls like without the change target feature. Hellpoint is pretty bad with it's difficulty spikes, but holy shit the Sentient fight is on another level.
-The encounter is actually physically harmful to play. Remember how the Four kings were a little disorientating because you were in a black void and you had no sense of distance? Well imagine that, except the screen has all of these flashy attacks constantly going off, the boss teleports everywhere making the camera suddenly make a 180 degree turn and you have to circle strafe to avoid it's attacks. It actually made me feel unwell afterwards, and I don't even have epilepsy.
-The Spawn NPC that shows up is fucking annoying. He is somehow faster than you and his attacks always stagger. He's not that big of a threat in terms of damage output, but he will stagger you long enough to get hit by the Sentient's bullshit wall of light attacks that knock you down, take half your health and then instant kills you because it triggers twice. Also, the Spawn has incredibly fast recover animations and will block most of your attacks. I had to cheese him with the Espadon's strong attack to chain knock him down.
The ending you get for beating the true final boss isn't even good. You just get dropped back in the Embassy and the Author is like "The multiverse is a bitch, huh? Don't forget, you're here forever." At least he remembers you if you come to him with 100+% data in NG+, which is a nice touch. Despite being required to beat the game, data is not lost on NG+, so you can basically just keep going to the next NG cycle after beating the first boss. Which is a bloody weird way of doing progression.
Not that it matters, because NG+ doesn't change anything.
TLDR, Hellpoint is a disappointment. So many neat ideas and art direction, fucking abysmal execution and just as many terrible ideas. It's fine at first but after you kill the Cosmic Gods there's pretty much nothing left to do except enter into NG+ by killing yourself or fighting two annoying bosses back to back, the latter of which is the clusterfuck I just ranted about.
Playing Factorio now, need to chill after nearly getting motion sickness from a video game.
