Dolls Nest Steam Charts & Stats

Got my copy of this game on release day and just finished my 5th playthrough to 100% everything the game has to offer and I have to say... This is easily one of my all time favorite soulslike experiences... I mean, it's still a far cry from a true souls thing, but the variety of builds and approach to every bit of content is absurd! Plenty of unique ways to focus and hone your character abilities, and massive rich and unique environments! There's very little I personally had any issue with, some of the weapons being such under-performers was extremely disheartening at the first bit of the game, almost feeling like collecting extra gear beyond the starting build was a fruitless endeavor, however there are a ton of utilities to mess with and perfect almost any gear approach. I have played 75 hours since it's release, and it's a title that will stay installed on my PC and I will be playing even more as I find myself in an aimless boredom... It's a very niche experience, but if you enjoy mech combat games from the late 90s and early oughts, where you could statistically overhaul everything from damage output to how high you can jump your mechs, this is a stunning experience rich with lore!

Game cleared. Pros: Quite solid on the mech actions and design, remind me the Armored Core in old days. A souls like world & gameplay is a good try and it does gets the characteristics on it. Cute anime girls would be a good adorn on top of it. Cons: Bosses design & story-line are rather simple, but can see devs effort on create variation on them. Weapons balance is an issue: -BP cost setting for heavy weapons is rather high compare to their DPS, made it hard to use on exploration. -Heavy weapons damage is too low or slow (in fire rating or time lost on frequent reload), overall DPS are lower than weapons with high fire-rate / large magazine, even harder to load them to battle. Overall a nice try on combining Armored Core and souls-like in one game. Have rooms for improvements in many aspect but still done a good job on it. Definitely worth more than its price and I am having a nice time on it.

Armored Core combat/gear tweaking meets Dark Souls world/level design with cyberpunk aesthetics of Nihei and cyber/Doll fashion, what's there not to like? Single playthrough will take you 20~30 hours depending on how enthusiastic you're about knocking walls and roofs when looking for paths, items, and secrets. Gear variety is massive and you should pay attention to never cripple your build with: [list] [*] Super low Handling as then you can't turn to aim fast enough in CQC. [*] Low jump as then you have hard time reaching items or hitting some bosses in melee. [*] Low sensor range as you can't lock onto enemies that stay in air and away. [*] Melee has horrendous downtime so dump your Humanoid points to it and pair with a frame that has high melee efficiency. [/list] And with the base price being 20e it's a really solid product [i]but[/i] this also means there are some minor nitpicks: [list] [*] Horrendous UE5 TAA ghosting at times on your armored doll. [*] Water Treatment Level needs optimization, even 4080 Super stutters and drops to sub-60fps at times. [*] Fantastic OST but >95% of the play time you only have wind howling as ambience/background noise. [*] Enemy types could have used more variety to force you to experiment with weapon categories more. [*] Some of the primary arms are more or less horrible UX as either they have low damage, long downtime or short range yet are not counter-balanced e.g. low damage paired with low cost and high rate of fire. [*] Similarly the rear arms have high ammo cost and hardly noticeable damage increase over primary arms, probably because they wanted players to conserve ammo. [*] The weapons you find later in playthrough barely feel like upgrades and sometimes the early weapons are most balanced of their category. [/list] But even then 20e is more than fair asking price, but better match your expectations accordingly.

This game is not a masterpiece and it definitely has issues. Some weird terrain where you should be able to walk and have to jump over the smallest of edges, some weapons (either due to the BP feature or other stats on the weapon) are borderline useless, and if you want to actually explore then any mobility frame piece with a low jump stat will kill your dreams faster than adulthood. That said, I did enjoy this game. It's a mech game with all the mech customization that comes with, good enough variety of enemies (mostly just the same style of enemies with different weaponry), decent bosses. Everything was just pretty good. It also had a demo, which is the only reason I got the game.

Did not expect a game this low priced to be almost as much fun as Armored Core 6. Great enemy design, and interesting level design. The dolls mecha design reminds me of an anime called Strike Witches.

As a long-time fan of Souls-like games and Armored Core games, this one stands out in a strange, interesting way. The game plays kinda like an old Armored Core game mixed with Dark Souls 1, leading to a unique yet fun game. I'd recommend it for anyone wanting more mecha action.

I really, really want to like this game. The visual design, part variety, item descriptions, and depth of stats for builds are all fantastic. But it's just so hard to enjoy with the weapon balance being so abysmal. Thanks to the absurdly poorly balanced ammo mechanic, using almost any back weapon feels like the tactical equivalent of chopping off my own arm because I got hungry. Ammo aside, many weapons also just take forever to deal any significant damage. Just like Daemon X Machina, there are dozens of weapons, but you will feel shoehorned into using a tiny fraction of them because the rest have no DPS or will run you out of ammo before the halfway point of a stage.

The last time I was this excited and happy to play a game was when Dark Souls 3 came out..... It's not a perfect game. It doesn't have next-gen graphics, but the world still manages to be beautiful and amazing. It has optimization issues with frequent FPS drops (I use an AMD 7900 GRE). But the game is fun and the story is intriguing and makes you want to discover and understand that world more and more.

1. It has a bust slider 2. It has a thickness slider 3. No censorship. 4. It's also an unoptomised Unreal Engine mess. 5. It deserves a sequel.

Overall, after about 30 hours on my first playthrough now done, though plans for at least one more playthrough, if not more... I will strongly recomend this game, but with big caveats. Quick and simple summary though Pros -Gameplay (when it works, is energetic and fast and quite nice) -Exploration, good number of side areas, hidden little spots, and branching paths that, at least initially, you won't know which one leads to the desired area (is once you know it all semi linear, but doesn't feel that way when first exploring it as much). -Level design, excelent level design, both from a gameplay standpoint of going from point a to point B often being interesting and varied, both mechanically and visually, as well as overall just feeling a bit more unique compared to most other games out there these days. Extreme size is offset by the players mobility (my walking is 37km/h, and dashing over 80km per hour, plus psuedo flying when needed, and there are faster frame options). -Enviornment Design... probably the best part of this game honestly, it's like the superstructures towering above you in AC6 or stuff, that dwar you when you're a ten meter tall mek, but now you're inside them as a human sized person... it's all just so oppresively huge and expansive. Bottomless pits aren't truly bottomless, you feel and know there's something down there, it just might be a shaft that goes for a few miles before then. On the verticality, you will find extreme amounts of verticality in these levels, like jump off an upper part, and spend ten plus seconds falling to a lower part. But just taking these in and looking at them and stuff is great, and they aren't all the same, some are indoors, underground, others inside towering structures, some outside of them, on the edges, with a variety of types and designs, it all is similar to a part but feels different enough going through all the zones. -Experience... between the wow and enviornmental interest, type of gameplay, and how character quests work... I felt like when I first played D Souls 1, my favorite of that series. It's not as good as it, but the experience and feeling was the closest to it for me I've gotten in any game I've played. So huge bonus for getting that vibe right. Cons -Visual quality, while the aesthetic and feel of the world is great, the actual graphics, like D Souls 1 today, just feels a bit lacking and rough, but with even less polish. Fidelity is low, with simplistic lighting, lacking enviornmental effects, audio, and all those little details that can really help a game, it lives off of it's macro sense, look at the micro and it's a bit lackluster. Luckily the game does focus you on that macro most of the time. Character art, tends to be stiff on animations, fabric doesn't simulate right and clips or bends with your head through your body or frame when looking up/down, NPC characters somewhat lack character with stiff idle poses/animations. Character animations sometimes are just missing/lacking, like a quad leg frame, it always just slowly walks forward, even if you go sideways, super fast, backwards, slow, forward, it's always that same slow forward walking animation that wont ever match your move speed over the ground. Lots of things if feel like a first pass just get it in the game to test it for now state, that was never replaced or refined later on. Also a huge issue is all the flickering as you move through levels or turn around. Anytime a part of a wall, each section or a mesh comes into view, it has a pop in period with the background white outside most likely visible, so you constantly are strobed by these white flickers as you move around and turn around in areas, especially indoors (a good bit of the game). A fairly simple fix, and sign of major optimization they can do int he levels in Unreal Engine by baking the meshes together, and upscaling their occlusion dimensions wich are fairly easy, though do take a little time to do across multiple massive levels I will grant, but well worth the time if they can fix this post launch and I hope they do. It'd improve performance, and look better. -Bugs, while luckily nothing gamebreaking here, lots of little issues, and some kinda big, are present around the game. I played melee build, and issues like if you drop and hit the ground, you have slight stagger animation for the landing, that can replace/overwrite an in progress swinging animation for a sword, so you can just lose your attack with it ending before the hit part because you touched the ground, in a game with lots of verticaly this happens a lot. I got pretty good at super timing to finish swings just before I'd touch the ground by the end, but between this and other bugs with melee early game it was honestly very frusterating, by end game, mostly good, though still annoying at times if overall nicely satisfying. -Optimization, while most of the early game was fine, when I got a water area, oh boy I started having some just terrible frame rates in indoor rooms in those places. Going from 60fps in most places, to in those rooms often sub 20, sometime sub 10fps. In addition there are some enemies like... tall spider multi legged ish ones in a dark area that fire lots of little shocky orbs around them, when those go off you go from 60, to about 5-10fps for a second or two. So a few specific areas/enemies that majorly cause issues, but for the most part it was fine on just medium or high settings in most areas. So ya, some big issues, it honestly feels in many parts like a alpha build of a game, before the models are all finalized, animations fully in, lighting baked, and all the polish happens, but even with that, I still loved the game and experience a great deal. If it had all these fixed and polished, I honestly think it could be one of my all time favorites, but for now is just one of my quite highly rated ones. Top 30 probably (I play a lot of games yes).