Sands of Aura Reviews

SHE GOOD BOIZ!

What a shame. The world seemed interesting, the art style and direction are excellent, and that's where the praise ends. The combat is a far cry from souls-style combat. It's very, very floaty, most weapons don't swing once when you press a button, they do a small sequence of attacks. There's no stamina system and attacks are fast, weightless and do very low damage, encouraging attack-spamming, which is obviously something you don't want to do with animation lock preventing dodging while in an attack chain. Right after the prologue basic enemies can and will kill you in 2-3 hits while taking 20+ hits to bring down, which to me doesn't really add to the challenge, but just makes already somewhat mediocre encounters feel tedious and unnecessarily time consuming, especially considering how limited your options are. Camera is very buggy, often getting stuck into terrain and randomly zooming in to an extreme closeup for no apparent reason, leaving you completely blind, often leading to your death because most enemies will kill you in 2-3 hits. This specific bug happened several times in one of the first locations I visited. Now, I've played a lot of souls-likes and I'm usually fine with dying in a couple of hits if the combat is polished and I can tell what I did wrong, the problem with this game is most of the time I'm getting hit while some over-the-top VFX is covering the enemy, through an attack that's supposed to stagger, or a combination of the above while several enemies are attacking all at once, making it impossible to keep track of them. I am sure this is partly a skill issue, but honestly I have no interest in getting better at the game if this is what the combat has to offer. I have read that the game gets a lot easier later on, but if you want to know for sure, you'll have to find out for yourself, because my issue isn't the difficulty, it's the jankiness, meaning that assuming this is true, it would change from tedious and cheap to tedious and boring, which wouldn't make it any better. Update: Since I passed the refund window, I figured I'd give it another go, but I legitimately cannot get past how bad the combat is. Every weapon combination feels like swinging around a foam tube, enemies are very, very spongy and always come in groups, attacks are poorly telegraphed and often just come out of nowhere, stagger is inconsistent, sometimes the same enemy will be staggered by your attacks, sometimes they'll hit you right through them, visual clutter from abilities makes it very hard to even see what's going on around you. In contrast to this, bosses are incredibly easy and lack any real depth. I really wanted to like this game, but I guess there's a reason 41% of players beat the first boss, and 19% finished the first quest, progressing through the game just feels tedious and I honestly cannot recommend it.

Yet another Souls-like game that manages to have an interesting world and level design while attempting to have tactile weighty combat that falls short into the realms of jank and hard to control. Maybe the interesting world will be enough for other people but for me a souls-like lives and dies on its combat so if you feel the same then pass on it.