Ling: A Road Alone Reviews

Challenging with a few BS mechanics, overall a decent time killer although i would love to see more content added to it in the future. thanks to IronPinapple for the vid that helped me find this game.

The man with the Iron Fist... No not that mediocre movie(s)... Very very cool short little game. It's really not as difficult as it presents itself. Hints can actually be gleaned from the achievements. When in doubt...punch it...

This intense action game is very fit for someone enjoying challenging strong enemies with pure skills. The success of combats are based on predicting enemies' movement so you can feel you are improving after every fight, which are very rewarding. Also, the art style and graphics of Ling are very polished and unique, making whole journey extraordinary. Boss fight is my favourite as I am totally thrilled by hitting the boss with the BGM beats. Highly recommend it.

Damn it was hard! Just finished my first playthrough and it was tough The game is beautiful, it can remind of Diablo 3, PoE in the way it looks, Dark Souls in the way it plays and Nioh in the way it tries to kill you and sends waves of enemies that gank on you. Bosses are fun, tough but doable... The most tricky/ frustrating part is the projectiles. As a melee fighter you can take all the melee enemies with some good parry timing...but projectiles! You can shoot/bounce them with your sword (the most efficient) or parry with your fist but then you have to hit the enemie back, kinda tough. The projectile boss is hard and messy, at least it was for me but the "shoot the projectiles back at you" technique works. There is this arena type fight in the desert where the game sends 5 or 6 waves of 3 identical enemies...this one was REALLY frustrating but so good to finally overcome! Yes, the game is tough and totally unfair but it feels good to beat. If you're a bit of a masochist then try this one...otherwise you'll hate it I'll try NG+ now

Developers will never read this anyways so that's just a WARNING for fellow players that think of giving this game a chance. "Came in without expectations, still felt cheated and disappointed." This game is unfairly difficult just for the sake of it. At first the game lures you in with interesting combat mechanics but then everything goes downhill really quickly. The idea of having fast paced combat based on movement and parrying is great, this is why I fell in love with the beginning chapter of the game. Though, even in the first 20 minutes of gameplay you can see glaring issues with its parrying mechanics. You have to literally predict when the AI will strike, if you try to react to the visual or audio cues you will almost always take a hit with the majority of foes. Some attacks are telegraphed and this is where the game shines but the majority of the enemies do not telegraph their attacks at all. Flying heads and dogs just lunge at you with no animation and parrying them is always a gamble on when the AI will decide to strike. There are plenty of ranged enemies too that lob projectiles at you every second or so and run away when you get closer. Encounters like these suck all the joy out of this game. More issues present themselves in the second area of the game where it introduces environmental hazards like mines and sentry turrets. Thankfully, you can "parry" mines away by striking them with your fist and sentries can be avoided if you stay far away from them but dying to either of those when you get swarmed by groups of enemies just makes you feel frustrated. Second boss fight was tedious af. Stay away from him and just deflect projectiles back. Getting closer is an option but will result in you taking a lot of damage if you time it wrong between the barrages of attacks. But nothing, NOTHING, is more infuriating than the last boss fight. It is one of the worst design choices ever period. You think that Bed of Chaos was a horrible boss fight? Do you think that maybe the Royal Rat Authority boss from Dark Souls 2 was bad and unfair? How about some good but incredibly difficult bosses that kicked your ass in the past like Sigrun from GoW? Maybe Orphan of Kos? Or your first time ever fighting Demon of Hatred? None of these bosses will make you as angry as the final boss of this game due to one simple reason. No matter how hard all of these listed bosses are, you will damage them and you will see your progress in the fight. Time after time, fight after fight, that health bar will be smaller and smaller and you will win. "Ling: A Road Alone" 's final boss is different because it can negate all that progress you made in less than 10 seconds. Let me explain. Once you damage the boss until it's health falls below ~60% it enters rage mode and starts aggressively dashing around and using the parry attack. If you had trouble parrying before - tough luck because this will be your final stop in the game even if you were good at it. The boss often positions itself behind you and then proceeds to attack with the parry attack. Why is this a problem? First of all it leaves the player disorientated, second of all it takes time for you to turn around. During that second of time for you to react, you need to have the boss at the correct spot where you can parry him and then also time it right to parry his parrying attack (sounds wild I know). If you time it wrong even once there is a big chance you will die in the next 8 seconds because the boss will stunlock you to death. If you manage to survive - kudos to you but don't celebrate just yet since the boss regains part of his health with every parry attack so him going from 10% hp all the way up back to 80% in the matter of seconds is a sight you'll see a lot (if you try to beat the boss of course). This boss is too random and is extremely punishing for any mistake. Worst of all, this game doesn't really have any story or deep lore nor memorable characters to keep you going. You can stop playing at any point or not play it at all and you will not lose anything. The only 2 good things I can say about this game is that at certain points the game looks incredibly pretty and that the soundtrack is quite decent. Save yourself some sanity and free time by playing something else. Now that my rant is over I will continue playing this game as a punishment for the money spent and will attempt to get all of the achievements.

Ok so far I have played about an hour, I have gotten to the third boss, and I have decided that this game is HARD. Like, [i] UNFAIRLY [/i] hard. Also edit: This review just got briefly featured in an Iron Pineapple video, I have peaked. TL:DR: starts off hack and slash with bloodborne-esque parry, becomes close quarter bullethell-like at third boss, and all the ranged enemies are just unfairly difficult, and there are undeniably moments where the performance drops. Even so it has charm, and I can't quite bring myself to say it's outright terrible. Maybe wait for a sale, but you can't be too upset for 6 quid. Now for my experience so far: The main idea of the game is that you have two attacks, one with your fist, one with your big meaty sword. You can flail your sword around all you like but it won't get you very far unless you parry and stun enemies with your fists. Both can be used to destroy ranged attacks, but that doesn't come into play until a bit later. And therein lies the problem. Because the game is so reliant on parrying, you'd ideally want the parrying to be somewhat choreographed. Until the second boss the developers seem to understand this somewhat, the big fat guys will raise their fists, you hit them while its raised. The dogs will charge at you, you hit them when they jump. The second boss will raise one hand, you hit him just before it comes back down. The timing is a bit funky but you can learn it. But then you get to the forest. Oh my god the forest. Up until this point you have been fighting two to three, five at most, enemies in a given encounter. But the forest just throws them at you constantly, as well as constant landmines which, while obvious, are not so easy to dodge around when your attacks push you forward and you are chasing after enemies that like to stay back and hurl constant projectiles which stun you for a good half a second, in which time more attacks can land, causing you to be stunned even more, with your only chance at escape being from a dash which quite frankly is shit. Half the time you will dash once every 3 presses of the space bar, the other half you will go flying across the map as each space bar tap counts as a dash and you dash insanely fast and far. It is also in the forest that enemies become nigh impossible to parry, I am looking at [b] you [/b] Mr blue floating skull thing. These are the enemies which are constantly hurling projectiles at you, with barely a moment between them. When you chase after them, they run away. When you run away, they chase after you. If you ignore them those projectiles will eat away at your health like there's no tomorrow, which is pretty easy to do when you are also focusing on 5 other enemies and a bloody minefield, the explosions of which cause your screen to completely spasm and (at least for me) framerate to die, and when you finally do close the gap, you manage to parry their next volley of projectiles, and you hit them, that hit send them flying away and you have to do the whole thing over again! It's insane! But you manage to get past them, through a lot of luck and a fair bit of skill, and you are faced with the third boss. Let's just say I don't like him, he is the blue skulls made 10x worse. His first stage isn't difficult, run up, parry, smack him a bit, run away, wait for his volley to end, run back and repeat, but his second stage hurts my soul. There is very little health recovery in this game, you either kill enemies or you parry an enemy's attack. Destroying projectiles, to my knowledge, does not. If it did, the fight would be a whole lot fairer and I probably wouldn't be so upset about it. But it doesn't. So every time you slip up and get hit by one of the projectiles, which cover about half the screen, you lose health, piece by piece. To get to the boss you need to get past all of these projectiles and parry... Something? I say that because I genuinely don't know if you can parry him during his second stage, I certainly haven't been able to yet. The game has gone from hack-and-slash to shitty bullethell that controls like a tank. Even so, the game does have its charm, when the hits do land and you get a rhythm going it feels amazing, some of its scenery is undeniably gorgeous, but the ranged enemies are just mean. There are some performance issues around the landmines as well.