Really cool game but i'd advise to pick it up while it's still relatively new.

In the current situation i'd say if you play in trios, encounters with other players will result in PvP in 90% of the time.
If you play duos, it's about 40% PvP.
And finally in solos, about 10% PvP.
This also varies from one map to another (some maps are known to attract more PvP players).

What makes this game special in my opinion is that in duos and solo, you never really know who is friendly and who isn't, which adds a whole extra social dimension to it.
Of course, there's always the occasional cowards pretending to be friendly to then shoot you in the back while you're looting, some others camping at extraction points, etc ... but honestly they're quite a small minority. Most people usually play fair game and will either engage in PvP right away, or maybe team up with you for some time, which is also nice when it happens.

Just don't buy the game expecting peaceful PvE the whole time. If you want to play peaceful and friendly, it's up to you to never shoot first, but then you also need to accept the fact that, well, you will start most fights on the backfoot (note that this doesn't mean that you will automatically lose the fight ; with good situational awareness and strategy you can win most fights even if you got shot first). As someone who plays mainly solos and duos, what i get in return for not being aggressive and sometimes losing a PvP encounter because i got caught by surprise, is far more valuable, so in my case, that is something that i'm fine with.

Unfortunately i have this feeling that the more time passes, the more players will start "playing it safe" and shoot everything that moves, hence my recommendation to buy the game while it's still young, to enjoy this current unpredictability that makes it so much fun in my opinion !

Ok, here we go ! This is going to be a chonker so buckle up my bois.

First things first : This game is an absolute banger and an amazing sequel to the first Hollow Knight.
HOWEVER, in my opinion, where Hollow Knight was an S tier game, Silksong sits slightly below in high A tier.

Why, you ask ? Well, everyone and their mom already discussed it, but this boils down to a design philosophy and vision issue, which personally i felt was taken a little bit too far. But more on that later ! First, there's a lot of positive things that i'd like to say about Silksong.

1. Music : Amazing work, just like for the first game.
2. Art direction & visuals : Absolutely beautiful, and they added a lot of particle effects and foliage, etc ... which really adds to the whole atmosphere and the feeling of being lost in the world.
3. The new crest system : I absolutely love it as it adds a lot of variety to the gameplay. I do think that it would be better if some crests were not so obviously easier to use than others, but so far it seems they're all viable in some way. It's just a matter of getting used to the moveset, mostly.
4. The boss fights : Compared to the first Hollow Knight, i found Silksong's boss fights were in general more enjoyable and memorable. I'm only comparing to HK vanilla bosses here, as if we were to include the DLC bosses then NKG and PV would still be at the top of my list.
5. The changes to charms (== tools) slots : I much prefer the new system in Silksong, which allows the player to make a higher variety of builds, where in the first game the charm slots made things quite limiting. Of course, this means that Team Cherry had to balance the tools around this, and therefore their general power level may feel a bit lower than in the first game.
6. Many other things which i can't remember now

Now, onto the reason why this in my opinion is an A tier game, and not an S tier like the first Hollow Knight (which is in my top 3 favorite games of all time).

For those who may think that these critics do not come from a legitimate player, i've done all achievements in HK, as well as all bosses in radiant. I've also completed all the gauntlets in Sekiro without using items/tools. I may not be the proest of all pro-gamers, but i reckon this is enough to give a fair assessment of Silksong's difficulty design.

And of course, i waited to 100% Silksong before jumping into this review.

To me, it basically comes down to this : Hollow Knight was a metroidvania living in a Souls-like shell, where Silksong is a Souls-like living in a metroidvania shell.
Where Hollow Knight did have some Elden Ring-esque "gotcha" moments, they were not that common.
However in Silksong, "gotcha" is basically the name of the game. In their effort to make the game more difficult, Team Cherry fell into a design philosophy that made it tedious instead.

As a huge fan of the first opus, and as you can judge by the fact that i still recommend the game, this was not enough to discourage me. However it definitely did lower my overall enjoyment by a small margin, and when you see all the negative reviews from players who couldn't take it anymore and threw the towel, it is clear that the direction Team Cherry took with this game could have been better.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some "Enjoy the tedium" things :
- The constant kiting from flying monsters (sometimes even throwing things at you from outside the screen)
- The cheap explosion trick at the end of a certain boss fight which for an obscure reason requires you to redo the whole fight, even though the boss literally exploded right in front of your eyes
- Stunned enemies dealing damage (2 masks) to you when you collide with them (might have been an oversight in the first game, but here it was left in intentionally)
- The rematch of a certain obnoxious boss that could have been far more enjoyable if it had been any other one
- The atrocious input reading on A LOT of enemies
- The idiotic gauntlets at the start of 50% of boss fights (which is a shame because again, the boss fights themselves are amazing in my opinion)
- Etc, etc ...

Why the game is overly sadistic and malicious in its level design in such a way, only Team Cherry knows. It's so weird because the first game had this incredible balance of having an overall easy main route (except for a couple of difficulty spikes), and very challenging content on the side. Not sure why they didn't just follow the same idea for the sequel ...

As for other things : The story is good, but in many ways similar to that of the first opus, which is a shame (avoiding details for obvious spoiler reasons). Also a lot of cliche areas/quests that felt really dated and overused. Sometimes it looks like the devs were out of ideas and just went to pick one in the "magic hat of video game cliches". Just to give an example, one of the sidequests requires the player to fetch 8 copies of an item that appears at random spawns on the map ... almost felt like playing an old school MMORPG for a moment.

So FINALLY, do i recommend this game ? Yes, especially to hardcore fans of Hollow Knight. If you're not one of them well ... hopefully you know what you're getting into !

Great coop game ! However to me, the fact that you need so much xp to level up characters, and that you need to level up the same character several times to unlock parts of different builds, makes the replayability not so great in my opinion.

In most roguelites, you have some kind of meta-currency, that allows you to unlock upgrades for whatever you want, but that is not the case in Ravenswatch. You only earn xp for the character that you take on a run, earning more the further you go. This means that you are rewarded for playing longer runs, but it also means that you will be forced to play the same basic builds with each character for quite a while. I wish that you could instead just allocate xp points to the desired character, so that you can try out other characters, then go back to the one you like to try out a new build.

But yeah, regardless, this is an easy thumbs up for me !

I enjoyed Dispatch, but it wasn't really what i expected. I knew it would be a story-heavy game, however the gameplay elements are even more limited than my initial expectations.

Sure, every chapter has a "dispatch" phase where you need to send heroes to missions, but one would assume that with time more mechanics, heroes, etc ... would be added to the roster, which is not the case. The first dispatch in the story feels deceptively similar to the last one. I will leave it there as so not to spoil important story elements, but just know that this game is basically like a visual novel, where you make choices that will cause the story the branch out into certain directions. The whole "Build your team of heroes and send them to missions around the city" is clearly not the main thing here.

So, with that in mind, how was the story then ?
Well, pretty good i'd say ! The voice acting is also well done, which is important for this type of game.

My only real criticism is that, the game makes it quite inconvenient for the player to try out other story options. There is no story tree (as is often the case with narrative games), and each time you want to go back to a previous scene to test some other dialogue options, you have to use a new save file (or overwrite the current one). There is also no skip option, which means that even if you've already seen the whole scene and just want to access the other dialogue options to see where they lead, you have to sit through it again.

I'm happy with my first playthrough, and the game is of good quality, so i'm giving it a thumbs up. However as far as replayability is concerned, until the devs implement some QoL changes, i'd say it's a bit weak.