I really want to love this game, and there is a lot in it I do love. There's lots to explore, the art and animation is great. Everything is surface level fantastic. But mechanically the combat is just untuned. Playing on legend difficulty, so ymmv with these points as I don't know how the lower difficulty experience feels with assisted parries.

- Timing for parries is way early and really short. Because you can not time it with when the attack is actually hitting your hitbox, you have to guess at when the moment is somewhere before the swing is actually going to hit you, but not where you would naturally parry in say Sekiro, or Ghost of Tsushima. Its super awkward and instead of it getting you into a rhythm it makes you guess constantly. Which leads into the second point;
- Many enemy attacks either hover FOREVER, or come out INSTANTLY - there is very few times that are in between and most attacks have perfect tracking (mid air turntables included) and insane 2 frame gap close.
- the enemy damage scaling is insane. like forget bosses, trash mobs 2-3 shots you even at level cap because the game scales up every trash mob faster than you gain power, so you are always fighting a losing battle and never actually get to feel powerful against anyone or anything.
- Even blocking you take obscene damage amd block is a different button to parry, so you find yourself having to tie up a keypress on block constantly because the parry is so inconsistently timed between boss attacks. On top of this, blocking also eats chunks out of whatever they call your stagger bar. It needs to pick a lane.
- There is a reason bloodborne is the only fromsoft game that had you farm for healing pots. It is bad. Having to run around for ages farming mats, or alternatively dumping a mountain of coins on buying them meant I had to do most bosses without healing to conserve resources unless I was close to victory.
- You will spend most of your time in game with access to only 2-3 pots for a fight at most because the collect-a-thon for improving your pot supply on hand is frankly, kinda obscene.

Is it impossible? No, I've certainly level capped and beaten a few bosses a bunch of times in solo and often underleveled. But I never once came away from a fight thinking it was fun or fair; even on the genuinely cool looking bosses with neat ideas behind them. It was always thank ♥♥♥♥ that absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is over, and until that mechanically changes, I just can not recommend this game.

The gameplay continues to be engaging/challenging/rewarding even after you've "seen everything" which a lot of friend-centric games seem to struggle with. Doable solo, but I can't recommend it as a single player experiance. 1000% better with at least one friend to laugh and lament with :)

There's no real strategy to be found here and what little there is, is not satisfying. Immediately found myself setting max speed and auto spin because there is nothing meaningful to do or think about in any battle.

I love this game, but I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate this games AI. To the point where it is becoming unplayable for me because it is so enraging.

The ship/fleet AI is a piece of garbage that not even mods are able to sufficiently fix, and you won't notice until you start building and trying to manage your own fleets which is an inevitible and huge part of this game. Ships suiciding into larger ships for no reason, ships flying solo into a swarm of enemies and dying for no reason, some ships set to defend just sitting still in space getting blasted without reacting, some ships set to intercept choosing targets furthest from their carrier when there are targets right next to it, and you guessed it, get cut off and die. Capital ships ignoring enemy laser turrets that are killing every repair drone they launch even though there are no other enemy targets in the area. Capital ships that have long range main guns but suicide boost towards enemy capitals to knife fight them... the list goes on.

Even simple move commands given to ships... THEY CAN'T EVEN GO TO A SPECIFIC EMPTY SPOT IN SPACE!
I've watched my XL carrier fly AWAY from the point I told it to fly to then give up without completing the command and resuming default behaviour until I manually clear and reissue the command and it then overshoots and keeps flying off... like wtf.

I've tried mods to fix the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI behaviours and in some cases it helps, but in others you just get to watch vanilla AI scripts and mod AI scripts fight each other and still not result in expected behaviour and in all cases you lose. I'm so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enraged by this game costing me every ship in my fleet due to it's own dumb ♥♥♥♥ behaviour. I spend more time fighting the game itself than the enemies in it. Absolutely pathetic.

This would be a 10/10 if the player owned combat AI ships simply did what you told them and acted predictably and intelligently based on the roles instead of whatever paint huffing doorknob licking ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is.

All these folks reviewing this game negatively after only 30mins to an hour have done the tutorial run, and maybe started a run at the first demon shard level at best. All of them have gotten things wrong in their reviews, so take them with a grain of salt. I can't comment on the full price really as I got it in Humble Choice - but on sale I can say with confidence it's 1000% worth.
Either way, this odd but fantastic little retro styled game continues to add more things as you collect more shards (by completing runs) and really does require you getting good and engaging with it's resources and mechanics to be successful.

If the original Demon Souls was made with the idea of darkest dungeon, it'd be this.