Bound By Blades

Recommended. A bite-sized Monster Hunter-lite whose fast one-to-three-minute boss loop and hitless rank economy hook hard in the first hour, undermined by janky hitboxes and an unexplained self-damaging enchantment. S+ ranks for flawless clears pay out money and materials worth the chase, projectile reflection and dodge-rolling reward mastery without commitment, and the Merthos pet layer (feeding, levelling, sending it on loot missions) gives the grind a cosy frame. The finale lands a genuinely darker beat than the monster-of-the-week writing elsewhere supports. Hitboxes that connect through rolls and on visibly missed attacks sabotage the flawless runs the economy invites, late fights stack overlapping water-spin and arena-wide fire hazards unfairly, and the Berserk enchant damages the wearer with no readable explanation. Level-ups grant a pittance against steep upgrade costs. As a three-hour hunt-and-repeat loop, it works exactly as intended.

Bound by Blades is a very cool boss-battler with unique, refreshing mechanics, but it is incredibly short. I finished the main story in about one hour, after which the game turns into a pure grind. Despite its length, it is absolutely worth the price. If you enjoy the core loop, you can keep playing and farming forever. I highly recommend it for fans of the genre!

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Super adorable Monster Hunter spinoff! You constantly fight bosses back to back in an arena that restricts your movement so that you can only stand on the corners and walk on the edges, emphasis is more about dodging (this also acts as a parry) and dealing Click Click damage (or holding but I found this very ineffective end-game despite it looking more interesting). With your loot you craft sets of the monsters you slay, or just feed them to your pet(s) which also help you during the combat as well as venturing to loot themselves while you are on your own business. I've played it from beginning to end with a friend and sure it was goofy and modest but we had fun all the 9 hours we've spent in the game (we played until we %100'd the achievements) I'm unsure if it could keep being fun after a while for solo players because there are just 20 bosses in total (10 being the alternate enchanted versions of the previous 10) and the game kind of repeats itself giving you the same bosses with higher health and damage overall so it helps having a company grinding the same encounters over and over, and well we've grabbed it on discount so it was a steal for the amount of enjoyment we had in…

I'm divided. Gameplay is fun, art is super pretty, world is interesting, and crafting/gathering materials looks compelling, but the lack of visual feedback in EVERYTHING is killing me. Buttons, crafting, equipping, quests, leveling up; the game is super bad at telling me when something happened/what will happen if I press a button, or where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do. It's confusing at first, and frustrating after a while.

Couldn't get invested in it.