Search
Fred (860 KP) rated the PlayStation 4 version of Red Dead Redemption 2 in Video Games
Dec 4, 2018
Beautiful humongous world (5 more)
Tons to do. Hours & hours of stuff.
Great acting and characters
Lots of Easter eggs
Wonderful music
Great story
That feckin robin (2 more)
Big world means lots of riding
New Austin is kind of dead
Rockstar let my mama's baby grow up to be a cowboy
Yes, I'm a little late to this party, but I wanted to play until I completed the game & today, I finally did. I've also played a few hours of the online beta, but I'll get to that later.
Let's start with what this game is about. It's an open world game, set in the old west. It's set before the events of Red Dead Redemption. In that game, you played as John Marston. In that game, John was a man trying to change his life. He was a criminal, a thief, a murderer, but he's gone straight In this game, you play as Arthur Morgan. A criminal in the same gang with John. He is a bad guy, no doubt. But throughout the game, he has many opportunities to do good. Of course, you can play him that way, or you can play him as a heartless bastard. This will effect some of the story, the dialogue & the ending of the game. I played the game as if Arthur was a good guy inside & the ending I got was very satisfying, very emotional.
For most of the story, you're on the run with your gang, setting up different camps throughout the map, evading rival gangs & the law. This is a great way to get to know the world, however, you're free to explore most of the map freely. It is enormous & gorgeous. Some of the best scenery I've seen in a game. Sometimes you will really feel you're living in a real world. And that's the greatest thing about this game. The immersion. You really feel like you're living the life of your character. And Rockstar did that by making you take care of your character. You shave, bathe, eat & take care of your horse. Yes, you name your horse, feed it, brush it, pet it. You get very attached to it, as it is your main way of getting around. If your horse dies, it's gone. And believe me, it hurts to lose your horse.
Rockstar fills the game with so many missions, side activities, random encounters & hidden Easter eggs that it will take you weeks to do them all. I've been playing since day one, an average of 6 to 7 hours a day, & today, 5 & a half weeks later, I finally got 100% in the game. To be honest, when I first started, I spent lots of time just riding around, finding activities & hidden goodies & enjoying the scenery. Like most of their games, there's a supernatural element to some things as well as supernatural encounters. Steampunk, monsters, etc... a little bit of everything. Some encounters are funny, some terrifying, all of them cool.
I think what makes this game different & better than it's predecessor is the characters themselves. I'm not talking about the main characters alone, I'm talking about the people who litter the world. In RDR, some of the characters were silly, off-the-wall & unnatural. They were cartoonish. In RDR2, the people are real. Some may be weird and a bit crazy, but they never feel fake. They never feel like a character. Because of this, the world lives. They breathe life into it with every interaction. From the
Civil War veterans to the blind beggar, to the racist jackass standing on the corner in Saint Denis handing out pro-white pamphlets. They really make you feel like you're there. Again, immersion.
Some of the things you can do besides the missions are rob people, trains, coaches, banks. Another thing is hunting. Hunting can be a great way to make money. During the game, there are many challenges that you can undertake as well. There's are 9 categories with 10 challenges to each that can be done at your leisure. I left a lot of these to do last. I honestly didn't think I'd be able to do some of them. They just seemed ridiculous. But funny enough, I did about 50 of the last challenges within 2 days. And when I finished, I expected my 100% trophy to pop up. But it didn't. I was at 99%. What the? Looking at my completion list, there was something under the collections section that said unknown collection. Searching the internet, I found that most sites didn't have it listed. But I finally found a site that did. The last collection was the hunting challenge. And this brings us to that feckin robin.
Okay, let me explain. The hunting challenge you are given is to kill 5 different lists of animals. Each animal must be a perfect carcass. Which means, they have to be of perfect quality before you kill them & you must not damage them while killing them. Well, all of these animals are small animals. And most of them are small birds. It was fairly easy to get most of these animals. But there was one that was a huge pain in the ass. Can you guess what it was? Yes, a robin. A small, fast bird that is so rare, there are pages & videos galore on finding one. Most of which as total bollocks. How do I know? I spent over 7 hours trying to find one. Going to all these spots, seeing 3 of them total, shooting one & ruining it's carcass, & missing the other 2 based on their disappearance through the trees. I was really going to give up. So close, but so far. Luckily, using some people's hints & coming up with my own, I finally figured out how to get him. And it then took me 15 minutes. Yes, 15 minutes with 7 hours of wasted time. I am putting this as a negative, because it was really ridiculous to try to hunt this thing. So aggrivating. I understand if they want to make something rare, but it's just not nice. I felt like Rockstar was pulling a joke on it's players.
But anyway, this still doesn't bring down my score of the game. It's one of the greatest games I've ever played. But Rockstar has many perfect 10 games under it's belt in my opinion, including RDR. Is this game better. Yes, I think so. But it's oh so close.
A quick word on RDR online. It's only in beta, so I can't give a true review yet. However, I'm finding it so much fun doing missions with other people. Of course, there are jackasses going around shooting people for no reason. It gives no benefit to do so. Not all of the features are in there yet, but I will be playing when it goes to full online & will giv an update.
Let's start with what this game is about. It's an open world game, set in the old west. It's set before the events of Red Dead Redemption. In that game, you played as John Marston. In that game, John was a man trying to change his life. He was a criminal, a thief, a murderer, but he's gone straight In this game, you play as Arthur Morgan. A criminal in the same gang with John. He is a bad guy, no doubt. But throughout the game, he has many opportunities to do good. Of course, you can play him that way, or you can play him as a heartless bastard. This will effect some of the story, the dialogue & the ending of the game. I played the game as if Arthur was a good guy inside & the ending I got was very satisfying, very emotional.
For most of the story, you're on the run with your gang, setting up different camps throughout the map, evading rival gangs & the law. This is a great way to get to know the world, however, you're free to explore most of the map freely. It is enormous & gorgeous. Some of the best scenery I've seen in a game. Sometimes you will really feel you're living in a real world. And that's the greatest thing about this game. The immersion. You really feel like you're living the life of your character. And Rockstar did that by making you take care of your character. You shave, bathe, eat & take care of your horse. Yes, you name your horse, feed it, brush it, pet it. You get very attached to it, as it is your main way of getting around. If your horse dies, it's gone. And believe me, it hurts to lose your horse.
Rockstar fills the game with so many missions, side activities, random encounters & hidden Easter eggs that it will take you weeks to do them all. I've been playing since day one, an average of 6 to 7 hours a day, & today, 5 & a half weeks later, I finally got 100% in the game. To be honest, when I first started, I spent lots of time just riding around, finding activities & hidden goodies & enjoying the scenery. Like most of their games, there's a supernatural element to some things as well as supernatural encounters. Steampunk, monsters, etc... a little bit of everything. Some encounters are funny, some terrifying, all of them cool.
I think what makes this game different & better than it's predecessor is the characters themselves. I'm not talking about the main characters alone, I'm talking about the people who litter the world. In RDR, some of the characters were silly, off-the-wall & unnatural. They were cartoonish. In RDR2, the people are real. Some may be weird and a bit crazy, but they never feel fake. They never feel like a character. Because of this, the world lives. They breathe life into it with every interaction. From the
Civil War veterans to the blind beggar, to the racist jackass standing on the corner in Saint Denis handing out pro-white pamphlets. They really make you feel like you're there. Again, immersion.
Some of the things you can do besides the missions are rob people, trains, coaches, banks. Another thing is hunting. Hunting can be a great way to make money. During the game, there are many challenges that you can undertake as well. There's are 9 categories with 10 challenges to each that can be done at your leisure. I left a lot of these to do last. I honestly didn't think I'd be able to do some of them. They just seemed ridiculous. But funny enough, I did about 50 of the last challenges within 2 days. And when I finished, I expected my 100% trophy to pop up. But it didn't. I was at 99%. What the? Looking at my completion list, there was something under the collections section that said unknown collection. Searching the internet, I found that most sites didn't have it listed. But I finally found a site that did. The last collection was the hunting challenge. And this brings us to that feckin robin.
Okay, let me explain. The hunting challenge you are given is to kill 5 different lists of animals. Each animal must be a perfect carcass. Which means, they have to be of perfect quality before you kill them & you must not damage them while killing them. Well, all of these animals are small animals. And most of them are small birds. It was fairly easy to get most of these animals. But there was one that was a huge pain in the ass. Can you guess what it was? Yes, a robin. A small, fast bird that is so rare, there are pages & videos galore on finding one. Most of which as total bollocks. How do I know? I spent over 7 hours trying to find one. Going to all these spots, seeing 3 of them total, shooting one & ruining it's carcass, & missing the other 2 based on their disappearance through the trees. I was really going to give up. So close, but so far. Luckily, using some people's hints & coming up with my own, I finally figured out how to get him. And it then took me 15 minutes. Yes, 15 minutes with 7 hours of wasted time. I am putting this as a negative, because it was really ridiculous to try to hunt this thing. So aggrivating. I understand if they want to make something rare, but it's just not nice. I felt like Rockstar was pulling a joke on it's players.
But anyway, this still doesn't bring down my score of the game. It's one of the greatest games I've ever played. But Rockstar has many perfect 10 games under it's belt in my opinion, including RDR. Is this game better. Yes, I think so. But it's oh so close.
A quick word on RDR online. It's only in beta, so I can't give a true review yet. However, I'm finding it so much fun doing missions with other people. Of course, there are jackasses going around shooting people for no reason. It gives no benefit to do so. Not all of the features are in there yet, but I will be playing when it goes to full online & will giv an update.
Paul Kellett (118 KP) rated The City of Kings in Tabletop Games
May 1, 2019
Great artwork (2 more)
Tons of content
Great for solo play
A bit fiddly (1 more)
Some scenarios are incredibly hard
A new take on the adventure game
The City of Kings is a tactical fantasy adventure, with procedurally generated monsters and some neat Euro mechanics. Frank West, the designer, has come up with a game that is massive in scope while being really simple to play and offering tons of replayability.
Set in an as yet unknown land, you take control of a hero (or, as this will be a solo focused review, a minimum of 2 heroes) to try and free the lands of the evil armies of Vesh Darkhand. The main story plays out over 7 stories, each with 4 chapters and 2 optional endings (Heroic & Legendary). There are also a bunch of stand-alone missions not tied to the main story.
The game is nothing less than stunning. The components are all top quality and the artwork is luscious. If you spring for the Deluxe version, you also get shaped wooden components for the resources as well as storage trays and some really useful plastic overlays to keep your character's stat cubes in place.
The game plays really smoothly. The rulebook is well laid out and gives the main rules in easily referenced sections. There is also a separate glossary which lists all the different creature abilities, location types, quest types and special tokens. This keeps the rulebook free of clutter and lets you learn about the different things as you play, giving the game a sense of mystery as you will be finding new things for many games to come. It's also really easy to open up and look up a skill.
The character sheets look intimidating but are wonderfully functional and quite intuitive as you start playing. Each character starts off the same, but as you kill monsters, complete quests and progress through the chapters, you will gain experience which lets you upgrade one of the several stats on your character sheet. This lets you customise your character and will make each play subtly different. You could go for attack and become the party's "tank" or you could focus on boosting your workers and be the one responsible for gathering the resources needed to buy better weapons or armour.
Each character also has a skill tree where you can gain different abilities unique to that character. With 12 different abilities and the restriction of only being able to pick up to 3 each game, it will take a good many games to try out the different combinations.
You get to perform 4 actions each turn and as well as being able to move your character across the map, you also start with a little worker that you can send out to the various resource locations on the map (when you have explored and found them) to gather the resources needed to purchase better equipment.
All (or most) of the map tiles will be face down at the start of the game, so you will be moving out of the city and exploring as you go, but when you flip over a monster spawn tile, you get to the meat of the game.
Unlike every other fantasy game, this is not your usual hack and slash, stand there and kill everything affair. This is more like a game of chess, you will need to be cunning and tactical to be able to survive and win.
You won't be facing the standard fantasy monsters, rather you will draw an enemy tile which will give you a description of the mob (yes, you are fighting groups at a time) you have encountered and then you will draw a stat card. These are numbered so after a couple of games you will know the basic stats of the next monster and be ready for it.
This sounds like it would become terribly repetitive, but each time you spawn a monster, you also have to assign abilities to it. these abilities are drawn from one (or more) of 3 bags containing Easy, Medium and Hard abilities so while you may know that the monster will do 4 damage and have 16 health, you won't know if it will spit poison at you, pull you into it's clutches or make you flee in terror. Or any number of other nasty things.
Line of sight, movement and combat is only done orthogonally, so as long as you are not in a straight line of the creature's range, you can leave him alone while you go about completing quests to either complete a chapter or to get the skills and equipment needed to defeat the beast.
On the whole it works very well. As is the nature of random token draws, you occasionally come across something that is just way too much to deal with and you will struggle to beat it, but that's all part of the fun.
I keep mentioning quests and equipment. There are two massive decks of cards, one you draw from when you interact with the quest location on the map. This will give you a quest that could be killing a monster, gathering a specific amount of a certain resource or, if you have the Deluxe upgrade, a dexterity quest. These are cool, you have to stack the wooden shapes in a tower without them falling :) and if you succeed you will gain XP and sometimes equipment.
The equipment deck is not quite a big as the quest deck, but still contains a load of cool tems which will be set out ready for you to purchase from the town or any discovered shop. To buy these you will need to have your worker running about the map harvesting the various resources scattered about the land and once you have enough, you can equip your heroes with mighty weapons and armour.
Be warned though, you can't just amble about the land at your leisure as each chapter has a strict time limit and if you have failed to complete your objectives by the time the clock strikes midnight after however many days you have been given, then the city will lose hope and you will fail. This makes for a very challenging experience where you need to work as a team and harmonise your skills to get the most efficient party.
Playing solo, you have to control a minimum of 2 characters, but it is not a complex task unlike a lot of other fantasy games. You don't have stacks of cards to shuffle through or tons of abilities or special rules to remember, just two character sheets with all the information easily seen and remembered. Depending on whether you play a single mission or a full story, the game will take between 1 and 2.5-3 hours and will offer a challenging tactical experience and a great narrative adventure that will be different every time.
This is such a good game and plays brilliantly as every player count (1-4) with different enemy stat bars to balance the threat against the number of players. Back on Kickstarter for a second printing along with some new expansion content, this should be on every gamers' shelf if you are a fan of great story driven fantasy games.
Set in an as yet unknown land, you take control of a hero (or, as this will be a solo focused review, a minimum of 2 heroes) to try and free the lands of the evil armies of Vesh Darkhand. The main story plays out over 7 stories, each with 4 chapters and 2 optional endings (Heroic & Legendary). There are also a bunch of stand-alone missions not tied to the main story.
The game is nothing less than stunning. The components are all top quality and the artwork is luscious. If you spring for the Deluxe version, you also get shaped wooden components for the resources as well as storage trays and some really useful plastic overlays to keep your character's stat cubes in place.
The game plays really smoothly. The rulebook is well laid out and gives the main rules in easily referenced sections. There is also a separate glossary which lists all the different creature abilities, location types, quest types and special tokens. This keeps the rulebook free of clutter and lets you learn about the different things as you play, giving the game a sense of mystery as you will be finding new things for many games to come. It's also really easy to open up and look up a skill.
The character sheets look intimidating but are wonderfully functional and quite intuitive as you start playing. Each character starts off the same, but as you kill monsters, complete quests and progress through the chapters, you will gain experience which lets you upgrade one of the several stats on your character sheet. This lets you customise your character and will make each play subtly different. You could go for attack and become the party's "tank" or you could focus on boosting your workers and be the one responsible for gathering the resources needed to buy better weapons or armour.
Each character also has a skill tree where you can gain different abilities unique to that character. With 12 different abilities and the restriction of only being able to pick up to 3 each game, it will take a good many games to try out the different combinations.
You get to perform 4 actions each turn and as well as being able to move your character across the map, you also start with a little worker that you can send out to the various resource locations on the map (when you have explored and found them) to gather the resources needed to purchase better equipment.
All (or most) of the map tiles will be face down at the start of the game, so you will be moving out of the city and exploring as you go, but when you flip over a monster spawn tile, you get to the meat of the game.
Unlike every other fantasy game, this is not your usual hack and slash, stand there and kill everything affair. This is more like a game of chess, you will need to be cunning and tactical to be able to survive and win.
You won't be facing the standard fantasy monsters, rather you will draw an enemy tile which will give you a description of the mob (yes, you are fighting groups at a time) you have encountered and then you will draw a stat card. These are numbered so after a couple of games you will know the basic stats of the next monster and be ready for it.
This sounds like it would become terribly repetitive, but each time you spawn a monster, you also have to assign abilities to it. these abilities are drawn from one (or more) of 3 bags containing Easy, Medium and Hard abilities so while you may know that the monster will do 4 damage and have 16 health, you won't know if it will spit poison at you, pull you into it's clutches or make you flee in terror. Or any number of other nasty things.
Line of sight, movement and combat is only done orthogonally, so as long as you are not in a straight line of the creature's range, you can leave him alone while you go about completing quests to either complete a chapter or to get the skills and equipment needed to defeat the beast.
On the whole it works very well. As is the nature of random token draws, you occasionally come across something that is just way too much to deal with and you will struggle to beat it, but that's all part of the fun.
I keep mentioning quests and equipment. There are two massive decks of cards, one you draw from when you interact with the quest location on the map. This will give you a quest that could be killing a monster, gathering a specific amount of a certain resource or, if you have the Deluxe upgrade, a dexterity quest. These are cool, you have to stack the wooden shapes in a tower without them falling :) and if you succeed you will gain XP and sometimes equipment.
The equipment deck is not quite a big as the quest deck, but still contains a load of cool tems which will be set out ready for you to purchase from the town or any discovered shop. To buy these you will need to have your worker running about the map harvesting the various resources scattered about the land and once you have enough, you can equip your heroes with mighty weapons and armour.
Be warned though, you can't just amble about the land at your leisure as each chapter has a strict time limit and if you have failed to complete your objectives by the time the clock strikes midnight after however many days you have been given, then the city will lose hope and you will fail. This makes for a very challenging experience where you need to work as a team and harmonise your skills to get the most efficient party.
Playing solo, you have to control a minimum of 2 characters, but it is not a complex task unlike a lot of other fantasy games. You don't have stacks of cards to shuffle through or tons of abilities or special rules to remember, just two character sheets with all the information easily seen and remembered. Depending on whether you play a single mission or a full story, the game will take between 1 and 2.5-3 hours and will offer a challenging tactical experience and a great narrative adventure that will be different every time.
This is such a good game and plays brilliantly as every player count (1-4) with different enemy stat bars to balance the threat against the number of players. Back on Kickstarter for a second printing along with some new expansion content, this should be on every gamers' shelf if you are a fan of great story driven fantasy games.
Charlie Cobra Reviews (1840 KP) rated the Xbox One version of Xuan Yuan Sword 7 in Video Games
Oct 4, 2021
Beautiful looking world and nice graphics (2 more)
Pretty enjoyable story and gameplay
Interesting mix of fantasy and history
Lacks the polish that could have made it great (2 more)
Too linear and doesn’t open up enough
Combat could have been further refined
Interesting and Ambitious but Ultimately Average
So to start this review I got to say that I'm pretty mixed on how I feel about this game. For one it definitely has a lot of potential and enough going for it that it could have been a really good. But on the other hand it had a lot of things that I feel could have been done better and falls far from being a great game to just around average for me. The story itself isn't terrible but it suffers from bad writing and performance of the voice actors. The world itself seems like it could have been a lot more interesting but it just wasn't engaging enough half the time.
It seemed like it was going to be an open world game but wound up being very linear in nature although it had aspects of an open world game like side quests, fast travel, and even treasure chests scattered throughout the game world as well. There's a climbing mechanic that seemed kind of pointless because it was pretty much just a cut scene of in game graphics of you climbing a little cliff or sometimes it would turn into an interactive part where you had to move the analog stick to move the character. Still it was better than these weird times that the game gave you control of the character for a scene in which your only movement was preset like a ride on a rail that couldn't veer off a road.
I liked that it was an action-RPG meaning instead of turn based combat like most RPG's it had an active combat system where you could move at your own leisure and consisted of hack and slash combat with some martial art skills, blocking, dodging, and some riposte (parrying). There are four basic martial art skills which can be learned as you progress through the game, Bull, Wolf, Bear, and Tiger. They become stronger and increase the length or hits of their combo the more you use them. A big draw back is that you could only equip or use two at one time although they can be changed at anytime through the talent menu. Then there are three special martial art skills which are Taowu, Tundou and ?
The combat was one of the things that had me really conflicted. A cool thing I liked about the combat was that there was a meter that would go up when you would attack an enemy and if it filled all the way you could perform an execution on them. Otherwise it was very unresponsive most of the time making dodging and parrying really hard and kind of useless. I found the blocking especially useless because of how much damage you still incurred. There is a skill tree for new martial arts and you can create and upgrade structures in Elysium that can enhance various things, such as weapon, armor, accessories and more. You can also use the fusion to capture the souls of enemies in combat and fuse them together in Elysium to equip them for bonus stats and effects.
Your able to carry items in your inventory which are mainly objects like items that don't do anything except advance the story or quest and some like healing weapons. There is an equipment screen for weapons and accessories but you only stay with one weapon the whole game. It does change and become stronger and its appearance changes too. You can even change outfits. I'm not sure if you get any in the game as the version I played came with a couple of additional weapons/costumes. You do wind up getting some party members which is customary of some RPG's and they help out by attacking enemies on their own. You can control them by activating some abilities or special attacks that have cooldown times for when you can use them again. There's a minigame called Zhuolu chess and it can be pretty fun and a nice change of pace but not what you were looking for when you bought the game.
You can save your game and recover health at random campfires throughout the game world as well as listen to some party dialogue when you choose to rest. The dialogue tends to repeat often and doesn't really advance the story much or fit where you are at in the story that often. These game mechanics are similar to Dark Souls as resting respawns enemies when you save at a bonfire and get healed too. As I mentioned earlier the game employs a fast travel system consisting of waypoints called guard stones that you can activate when found. There is an element of puzzle solving in the game but they don't seem to be that hard to figure out and some can even be skipped if you don't want to bother with it.
The graphics were pretty solid and the game surely looks good for the most part. The textures are sometimes rough in the environment and sometimes there's very noticeable instances of "pop-ins" but overall aesthetic and style is beautiful. You really never get to play games where you get to see ancient Chinese castles, cities, or kingdoms so that was nice. The leaves in the trees are even ruffled by the wind, which is a nice touch. The main characters like Zhao and his sister Xiang look great and so do most of the secondary characters like Chu-Hong and Mo Huang. It just makes it that more disappointing when you see sub-par detail in the NPC's and stiff cutscenes because you know they could have done better on those too. Maybe they didn't have enough time, man power or budget.
The music was probably one of the best additions to the game as a whole. Containing traditional Chinese sounds and instruments befitting the setting the music was great. There are some instances where there is no music and the void is filled with nothing but awkward silence or the sound of footsteps. Only the subpar voice acting fills the dead air and background music would have added more depth to certain parts and scenes of the game. There's no English dubbing for the voice acting in the game it's only in Mandarin/Chinese which isn't bad in itself except the performances are kind of hit and miss and not very balanced.
Verdict: [5/10]
The game seemed very rough around the edges, it lacked that "polished" feel that it would have gotten if it had been a "AAA" game instead of a "AA" game. It's linear aspects left little to no deviation for exploring the world other than the main quest making it feel like going through a tunnel from location to the next. The distances between the towns and villages also made the world feel really small which it probably was. The story and gameplay were enjoyable enough but writing and especially acting/voice acting in key cutscenes needed work. The combat was was so uninspired I felt like I was doing the same sword attacks the whole game and they never really changed. And last thing, even if it doesn't help or is in any way useful, I like to be able to make my character jump and this game didn't let you do that either. So in conclusion I have to give Xuan Yuan Sword 7 a 5/10. It's an average or ok game, which has it's moments but nothing to write home about. However if they make a Xuan Yuan Sword 8, I'd be looking forward to see what kind of improvements they would make in the next installment.
It seemed like it was going to be an open world game but wound up being very linear in nature although it had aspects of an open world game like side quests, fast travel, and even treasure chests scattered throughout the game world as well. There's a climbing mechanic that seemed kind of pointless because it was pretty much just a cut scene of in game graphics of you climbing a little cliff or sometimes it would turn into an interactive part where you had to move the analog stick to move the character. Still it was better than these weird times that the game gave you control of the character for a scene in which your only movement was preset like a ride on a rail that couldn't veer off a road.
I liked that it was an action-RPG meaning instead of turn based combat like most RPG's it had an active combat system where you could move at your own leisure and consisted of hack and slash combat with some martial art skills, blocking, dodging, and some riposte (parrying). There are four basic martial art skills which can be learned as you progress through the game, Bull, Wolf, Bear, and Tiger. They become stronger and increase the length or hits of their combo the more you use them. A big draw back is that you could only equip or use two at one time although they can be changed at anytime through the talent menu. Then there are three special martial art skills which are Taowu, Tundou and ?
The combat was one of the things that had me really conflicted. A cool thing I liked about the combat was that there was a meter that would go up when you would attack an enemy and if it filled all the way you could perform an execution on them. Otherwise it was very unresponsive most of the time making dodging and parrying really hard and kind of useless. I found the blocking especially useless because of how much damage you still incurred. There is a skill tree for new martial arts and you can create and upgrade structures in Elysium that can enhance various things, such as weapon, armor, accessories and more. You can also use the fusion to capture the souls of enemies in combat and fuse them together in Elysium to equip them for bonus stats and effects.
Your able to carry items in your inventory which are mainly objects like items that don't do anything except advance the story or quest and some like healing weapons. There is an equipment screen for weapons and accessories but you only stay with one weapon the whole game. It does change and become stronger and its appearance changes too. You can even change outfits. I'm not sure if you get any in the game as the version I played came with a couple of additional weapons/costumes. You do wind up getting some party members which is customary of some RPG's and they help out by attacking enemies on their own. You can control them by activating some abilities or special attacks that have cooldown times for when you can use them again. There's a minigame called Zhuolu chess and it can be pretty fun and a nice change of pace but not what you were looking for when you bought the game.
You can save your game and recover health at random campfires throughout the game world as well as listen to some party dialogue when you choose to rest. The dialogue tends to repeat often and doesn't really advance the story much or fit where you are at in the story that often. These game mechanics are similar to Dark Souls as resting respawns enemies when you save at a bonfire and get healed too. As I mentioned earlier the game employs a fast travel system consisting of waypoints called guard stones that you can activate when found. There is an element of puzzle solving in the game but they don't seem to be that hard to figure out and some can even be skipped if you don't want to bother with it.
The graphics were pretty solid and the game surely looks good for the most part. The textures are sometimes rough in the environment and sometimes there's very noticeable instances of "pop-ins" but overall aesthetic and style is beautiful. You really never get to play games where you get to see ancient Chinese castles, cities, or kingdoms so that was nice. The leaves in the trees are even ruffled by the wind, which is a nice touch. The main characters like Zhao and his sister Xiang look great and so do most of the secondary characters like Chu-Hong and Mo Huang. It just makes it that more disappointing when you see sub-par detail in the NPC's and stiff cutscenes because you know they could have done better on those too. Maybe they didn't have enough time, man power or budget.
The music was probably one of the best additions to the game as a whole. Containing traditional Chinese sounds and instruments befitting the setting the music was great. There are some instances where there is no music and the void is filled with nothing but awkward silence or the sound of footsteps. Only the subpar voice acting fills the dead air and background music would have added more depth to certain parts and scenes of the game. There's no English dubbing for the voice acting in the game it's only in Mandarin/Chinese which isn't bad in itself except the performances are kind of hit and miss and not very balanced.
Verdict: [5/10]
The game seemed very rough around the edges, it lacked that "polished" feel that it would have gotten if it had been a "AAA" game instead of a "AA" game. It's linear aspects left little to no deviation for exploring the world other than the main quest making it feel like going through a tunnel from location to the next. The distances between the towns and villages also made the world feel really small which it probably was. The story and gameplay were enjoyable enough but writing and especially acting/voice acting in key cutscenes needed work. The combat was was so uninspired I felt like I was doing the same sword attacks the whole game and they never really changed. And last thing, even if it doesn't help or is in any way useful, I like to be able to make my character jump and this game didn't let you do that either. So in conclusion I have to give Xuan Yuan Sword 7 a 5/10. It's an average or ok game, which has it's moments but nothing to write home about. However if they make a Xuan Yuan Sword 8, I'd be looking forward to see what kind of improvements they would make in the next installment.
