Samurai: Ronin's Path

Fun little top-down slasher that runs about 90 minutes for 5 dollars, which is fine with me. You travel through rural Chinese villages and coasts and castles and every so often, a group of enemies attack you. This might be all ninjas (very fast), pole fighters (long reach), guards (heavy armor), skeletons (good at swarming you), and so on, or it might be a mix. You're awarded one upgrade point after each level which improves various stats and skills. The combat is fast and fun if simple, with a lot of emphasis placed on dodging and parrying. You just can't hack your way through a half dozen enemies, you have to pick your spots while doing a lot of avoidance. There are also bosses who have special moves and weapons, as you'd expect. There's not much of story nor is there any exploration or collection, just keep moving forward, fighting groups of enemies until you get to the boss. It's a missed opportunity not to have made this a score-based game with leaderboards, then it would be fun to replay the levels and compete with others. The graphics are limited but the character models are nice, a decent amount of thought went into their armor and weapons. It's not a big deal but if you'…

What a piece of ♥♥♥♥. This is possibly the single most sluggish hack n slash game I've ever seen. The controls struggle to connect, the character model struggles to face enemies its attacking, and even when it does and the enemy is stunned the animations will sometimes curve around the target in an unnecessary spin move that makes you miss and clip right past them. Parry is also so slow it's not a responsive action, it's a predictive one, you have to use it before your enemies attack because it's too slow to intercept attacks, the problem is you're constantly fighting half a dozen enemies who have no que-up animation to their attacks so you can't track when they're going to attack. Just everything about this was awful and I could see the writing on the wall in the first three minutes, but apparently had to play at least a few minutes more to be able to review it. This game sucks, and it looks like it's abandoned so it's never going to improve. All other elements of the game such as music and plot are pretty negligible and bare bones.

[h2]Sum-Up[/h2] [h1]In-depth analysis further down.[/h1] [table] [tr] [th]🟩 Pros[/th] [th]🟥 Cons[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]Beautiful Japanese-inspired environments, featuring forests, temples, cherry blossoms and atmospheric battlefields.[/td] [td]Extremely short campaign, completed in just 117 minutes.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Fast-paced, satisfying Samurai combat with brutal executions and decapitations.[/td] [td]Very superficial storytelling with almost nonexistent character development.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Good enemy variety, including ranged fighters, armored opponents and different combat styles.[/td] [td]Parrying can feel unintuitive, especially when surrounded by multiple enemies.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Several unique bosses with interesting mechanics and occasional difficulty spikes.[/td] [td]Skill tree focuses mostly on passive improvements rather than introducing entirely new abilities.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Unlockable skills, Kunai and finishing moves make combat increasingly enjoyable.[/td] [td]Some bosses and enemy encounters are reused throughout the campaign.[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Forgiving checkpoint system that prevents unnecessary repetition after dying.[/td] [td]Limited narrat…

Barebones.

Slicing and dicing enemies was fun. Acquiring all the achievements was simple and I would recommend this game!

Gameplay- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Nothing special ☐ Okay ☐ Bad Graphics- ☐ Masterpiece ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Will do ☐ Bad ☐ Awful Audio ☐ Amazing ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☑ Decent ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad Audience ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Everyone Story- ☐ Lovely ☐ Good ☐ Average ☑ Not great ☐ None Difficult- ☐ Just press a bunch of buttons ☐ Easy ☑ Significant brain usage ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Not so easy ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls Game Time- ☑ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☐ Depends on you ☐ Endless Price ☐ Just buy it ☑ Worth the price ☐ Wait for sale ☐ Maybe if you have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended All in all, I liked this game. It's far from perfect, but I enjoyed my time with it. I really thought the sound design was a let down. Music is somewhere around "just okay" and I felt the audio for attacks could have been greatly improved to make the combat feel cooler/better. I also hate the sound that plays when enemies throw bombs, that one should just be scrapped and redone entirely. I found the heavy attack ability to be worthless. I don't think it's stacking with the 20% damage increase you can unlock so my light attacks seemed to have been doing slightly more damage …