So. Impressions after 1 hour 35 minutes after first boss (not the troll)
Gameplay
- Great combat feel. Ties in with graphics, but animations make it so that every attack looks like it has weight behind it.
- Enemies attack following their own individual patterns. So can't focus on one. Need to dodge around everyone (playing on Hard). You can only survive around 3 hits.
- More akin to combat like a souls game than the old GOW games. Even fighting 5 mobs, it doesn't feel hack and slashy.
- First troll (one from trailers) could be ultra cheesed by flying axe. It took a while, but it never even hit me (first time I tried melee and it oneshot me).
- First boss was fun, but somewhat easy considering I am on hard (one more difficulty slider above what I use).
- No QTE evens so far. Might come later, but so far what would have been QTE scenes from the previous games are just video sequences in this.
- Already in the tutorial opening part you find things and encounters off the beaten path. (Still only found 3 of 4 toys which annoy me to no end and I want to restart, but I think this game lets you backtrack so I wont)
- Skill trees that I can see are axe, shield\defence, bow\rage\unarmed (bow is tied to the kid). No idea if there are more weapons later, but don't see any skill trees for them at the moment. I hope there are more. Kind of strange to add a loot mechanic to the game and limit you to one weapon. Granted I think you do get runes which change stats\add abilities to the axe.
Audio
- Nothing really to say. Good? Don't notice it, so nothing bad at least. Voice acting is good for the three characters I've heard so far.
Graphics
- ..... just wow. Playing on a Pro, 4k tv with resolution mode and HDR on. It. Looks. So. Good.
Only negative so far is that it is more "open" yet closed? Can't jump or fall off cliffs (at least not yet). Every time you can jump, you see a O icon and you press circle and you jump. When climbing, you can't jump to the side before you move your camera to the point where you see the O icon. You feel "stuck" to the ground if that makes sense. Example: A little hidden chest behind some trees and rocks. It looks like you'd easily be able to climb\jump over the rocks, but you can't. Need to find a specific point that lets you climb over that one particular object.
So while the areas you explore are more akin to Darksiders, your movement is still very linear.
Latter part is an incredibly minor gripe though, and more common than not in these games, so can't really fault it at all for it. 9/10 first early impression