Young Souls Reviews

TLDR: if you like parry-based game, you might like it. I) The Co-op is not good a) Story After playing just 20 minutes with my wife, she said to me "Sorry but can we play a real game?". She's referring to the unskippable (can Fast Forward, but it's not "Skip") dialogs and cutscenes and chores (Go speak with X NPC) you have to do sometimes. Well why don't we watch the story then? Have you ever had a good experience reading a comic book or a novel with another person? Reading together just sucks. Watching a movie is fine as a "co-op" experience, but not reading. Reading is always a poor experience in a couch co-op game. Funny thing is right after this, we started playing Resident Evil 5 in couch co-op and both loving it. I would argue RE5 is also story-heavy, but how it delivers it is much better for a couch co-op experience. b) Co-op player revival It's one of those games where if one player is down, the other player has a high chance of dying or taking serious damage while trying to revive the fallen partner. Many games do the same but it's very poor co-op experience and usually hate it. Also each player has a set number of lives. So if a player runs out of lives, they're gonna be sitting that one out. Not fun for a couch co-op experience. 2) Gameplay I then moved on to play the game just by myself. I love Dark Souls, and I love Streets of Rage, what could go wrong? The combat centers around one thing: Your dodge and/or Parry. Dodging is a lot stronger than in Dark Souls because: 1) You can dodge to cancel any action you are doing 2) Attack Recovery time is very high So whenever you start attacking, you will have to make sure you have enough stamina to dodge roll away. What happens is you're often gonna be running away so that your stamina comes back, then start attacking+dodge, and then repeat the process. OR YOU CAN PARRY. I personally hate parries in video games. That might be why I don't like this game too. I tried playing without parry but it becomes cooldown based game where you are waiting for your stamina before engaging with the enemy.. Also sometimes, enemies get super-armor at random timing. Sometimes you can hitstun the enemies, sometimes you can't. It's not well communicated when it happens or not. Also: Run is 2 flicks of the joystick. If it was on a D-PAD it might have been okay, but on a joystick? It's so tedious to do for such a simple action. 3) Visibility sucks!! You can barely see what's going on. There's so many white flashes (cannot disable in the settings, unlike camera shake), the camera moves around where you are not centered, and sometimes even out of focus? The game being so fast paced it's unbelievable how anyone can see clearly what's happening

Wow. I can't speak enough about how wonderful the art style, how seamless the action is, and how wonderful of a game this really is. It's a short one. But, just like a fillet mignon, you'll enjoy every bite and wish there was more when you're done. Pick this one up. I wish I did when it was full price.