Well… finished both available missions and am pleasantly surprised tbh
Given my series fatigue with the Souls games I didn't think I'd enjoy the demo as much as I did.
Combat feels nice for the most part, can't roll your face over the controller and still kill the enemies like most other games these days
I wish there was a bit more combo variety though. I guess having the option to determine the strong ender at different stages of a light combo might be enough… you can currently only set the same ender for all combos (and I think only the katana has 2 different strong ender skills atm anyway) I really like the stamina/Ki management, depleting enemy stamina to use finishers and having to watch your stamina close enough to not overcommit and e.g. trigger the recovery animation, if you try to dodge… that killed me quite a few times XD
Stances are a nice touch and it works really well and fluent during combat, though I don't really use the low stance a lot. The damage output in this stance seems a bit too low. The skills trees are also nice, quite a few passives in there, but whatever… TW3 considers itself an RPG and the skill trees are almost exclusively passives. And even if they erm… death system… is ripped off from DS, they at least added a spin – you loose your sprit as well, but can choose to call it right back at the shrine, leaving all “XP” behind (and apparently some items as well… though there aren't any items in the demo that seems to meet that criteria)
UI is pretty and highly usable (compared to Souls games anyway), level design is clever enough (shortcuts etc.), the Yokai look pretty cool as well as the Bosses and the Boss fights were interesting.
The thing that bothered me the most was the loot… too much stuff to loot, same items over and over with different levels and random perks etc. It's a standard RPG trash loot system and I really don't like that lol
Potential is certainly there… let's see if it translates well to a full game.
