Valor Mortis

I really want to like this game. I think there's a lot of good things from a lot of different influences and the pieces are all here. It's a neat mix of souls-like, action RPG, FPS with some light platforming in a fresh setting. I love a AA darling that is willing to take risks and try something different. However, the biggest and most frustrating thing is the completely nonsensical player hitbox and it fundamentally puts an huge damper on the entire game. For a game that is entirely built around parrying, because even with full stamina perks you will completely be drained the moment you try to play aggressive or dodge, the readability of whether an attack is going to hit the player needs to be excellent. Unfortunately, almost every attack in this game has terrible readability. If I can see the entire length of the weapon swing in front of my character, the attack shouldn't hit. Enemies will lunge and I can see their entire weapon in front of me and I will still be hit. A boss can do an AoE sweep and I can see their entire weapon in front of me and I will still be hit. Dogs will leap and finish their bite in clear view and I will still be hit. You get the idea. This makes absolutely no sense from a first person perspective. Look down at your stomach. If you can see the tip of a rod in front of you, the rod isn't hitting you. I don't know how this feedback wasn't given during testing or if it was just ignored, but it is incredibly egregious. I'm not sure the dev work it would take to rectify this, but I consider the game to be almost unplayable because of it. Which again is very unfortunate because I think there is so much good in the game DNA, but whoever signed off on this hitbox for a first person perspective needs to have someone swing a bat at them to see what it looks like for it to hit. There are other issues, but I think they generally become much less of an issue if the readability for when a swing should hit the player is improved. The stamina bar is very small and you're punished pretty heavily with a large dent to your stamina for blocking instead of parrying. Even with max stamina perks, you only get about 5 swings in, which isn't much when a full light combo is 4 swings. Which is also a strange decision when you're encouraging the player to go aggressive to recover lost HP after blocking, but you don't have the stamina to do that after losing a bunch from the block. Player damage also feels very low in the beginning and there's no real stagger done to enemies when you hit them, meaning even more demand is on the player to play defensive and be succeeding on most of their parries to posture break. Enemy attacks can be frustrating with delayed/held animations that suddenly speed up, but that's become pretty common in the genre and if I could reliably trust if I'm in range or not I could adjust to the timing to parry. I think a lot of the other negative reviews are overly harsh, but I understand their frustration when it feels like you're fighting trying to determine if a swing is going to hit you rather than fighting the timing of the swing. I will continue to play the game because I do find a lot of it to be very engaging, but it will likely be in small play sessions until I get frustrated with being hit by things clearly ending in front of my character. If this gets addressed I think there is a very well done and enjoyable game here. But currently it is just way too common and noticeable of a flaw to not be frustrated with most fights.