Stray Blade

*This review was machine translated from Korean to English. Stray Blade Gorgeous to Look At, Misery to Play: An Action Game Without Common Sense 🎨 The Saving Grace: Decent Visuals and Motion Variety To be fair, the game looks decent. While the combat itself isn’t mechanically smooth, the developers didn’t just copy-paste the attack strings. Instead, they put effort into designing distinct animations and execution moves for each weapon category. It gives the combat some visual variety and makes trying out new gear okay to watch. The world is also reasonably well-designed and nice to look at. The art direction does its job, creating a solid backdrop that functions well enough. The developers at least knew how to make a game look presentable. 🎮 Clunky Movement and a Baffling Control Scheme Right off the bat, the game feels fundamentally sluggish. Attack movement has a noticeable delay, and the hitboxes are completely disconnected from the actual animations. When an enemy attacks, you're better off just blindly blocking or parrying because visual cues mean utterly nothing here. But the absolute worst offender is the default control scheme. It’s downright baffling. Every single c…

Cons: - Where the hell am I? what is this map? - Too many framedrops. - Where the hell am I? what is this map? - Not optimized to an absurd degree. - Where the hell am I? what is this map? - Where the hell am I? what is this map? Pros: + Souls-like with an actual pause button. + Progression is very good. + Combat is very good. + Can choose difficulty and advanturer 2/4 is very balanced (Final boss too impossible. need to fix) + There is a story, that is skipable. Conclusion: Not good enough to recommand, the most annoying thing is that you have always trouble to tell what the objective is or where it is. The "not knowing where to go" is a huge downside, to the point I really hated playing this.

Finished Stray Blade after about 18 hours. It’s a classic “jack of all trades, master of none” soulslike. The game tries to be an open-world Metroidvania with crafting, weapon mastery, and interconnected areas… and ends up being mediocre at almost everything. Here’s my honest review: POSITIVES: - The world of Acrea is genuinely beautiful — large, varied, and atmospheric. - Performance was fine on PC (smooth 60 FPS the whole time; the issues that exist never felt game-breaking). - Lore is delivered in proper soulslike fashion through item descriptions and scattered notes. NEGATIVES: - Navigation is terrible. The world looks great but is a confusing mess to actually move through. There are way too many looping shortcuts that just send you in circles, and because it’s only semi-open, you constantly get lost. - No map markers + Metroidvania ability gating is a brutal combination. Good luck remembering where that one spot with the special rocks was after you’ve explored for 10 hours. - Weapon-mastery leveling system is awful. You can only spend skill points tied to a weapon after you fully master it. Hate daggers but they gate health upgrades? Too bad — you’re forced to gri…

I liked the graphical style and world design. Lots of exploration with complex maps that sometimes had me lost and going in circles. Combat is ok but gets a bit repetative as there are not enough enemy types. No cloud saves so transfering saves back and forth from my 2 PCs was annoying.

Baby's first soulslike. Not difficult by any stretch of the imagination, but not bad either.

if you don't think it's good or it's too bright and colorful. Just turn up the difficulty.