Sekiro: Shadows die twice

[TLG NoStresS]

    

                                                                      

The enemy samurai fires a bolt from his enormous bow. I tap the parry button and slice the arrow out of the air. I know the shot is just cover for a sliding charging slash with his blade. It's two quick strikes, but I'm expecting it. I tap the block button twice to deflect both with a loud ringing sound and a flash of sparks. A glowing red symbol tells me that an unblockable attack is coming, an attack that has killed me three or four times before.

     Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the latest from Dark Souls developers From Software. It's set in a fantasy vision of Sengoku Japan, in the middle of a conflict between the Ashina and Hirata clans. You play a rogue shinobi called Sekiro—the one-armed wolf—charged with protecting a young lord who has the coveted power to defy death. It's more of an action game than an RPG. You pick up new prosthetic arms and learn new combat techniques, and even put skill points into a few upgrade trees. Don't expect to be fiddling with armour stats: this is a game about brief, deadly battles in an age of kunai and katanas. Sekiro's combat system is beautiful. Instead of chipping down health bars until the enemy keels over, you overwhelm their posture bar with strikes and perfect parries until an opening appears, and then finish with a deathblow. Enemy health bars are there to affect the amount of damage an enemy's posture takes. As you get slashes through an enemy's guard and damage them directly, they will take more posture damage from future attacks and recover more slowly.

 

You attack enemies with combos, special sword attacks, prosthetic gadgets and shinobi arts, but the aim is always to max out that posture gauge and get that final blow. I love the catharsis of beating a great boss in a From Software game. In Sekiro the deathblow system focuses all that emotion into one split second. After a tough encounter there's a rush of elation and relief when you see the glowing red deathblow reticle and hit the killing attack. Boss exchanges can be gruelling. If you dislike using parry timings in combat—pressing the block button just as an enemy attack lands—then Sekiro might not be for you. Some bosses require you to consistently parry multiple combos. One fight in a tight space with a creature called Long-Arm Centipede Giraffe is basically a rhythm action sequence. You can't avoid their blitz of attacks; you just have to deflect them all in a shower of sparks and shwing swhing shwing noises. Precise deflections deal posture damage back to the enemy, and some enemies are designed to be defeated using deflections alone. It's a tough but incredibly rewarding system to master. It feels amazing to effortlessly deflect and counter enemies that were once a terrible challenge.

 

Thankfully parry timings are generous and much more responsive than the vague shield-wave you get in Dark Souls. You can also hold block and then release-and-tap to get a parry, which keeps you relatively safe as you're learning enemy attack patterns. Enemies throw you out of blocking with special thrust, slash, and grab attacks, which have their own counters. You can step on a thrust, and you can jump over the slash, kicking off the enemy's head with a tap of the A button on a controller for a good dose of posture damage. You can use your dodge to avoid many grab attacks, but as you fight deeper into the game, expect enemies to start wrong-footing you with unusual attack patterns. You can counter with your increasingly powerful prosthetic arm. As you find upgrades you can return to your hub, the Dilapidated Temple, to have your gruff but caring sculptor friend install and upgrade them. Upgrades include an axe that smashes enemy shields, an unfolding metal umbrella that deflects gunfire, a device that throws shuriken (brilliant for knocking jumping enemies down mid-flight), and more that I won't spoil. You can switch between three at a time and swap those three around in the pause menu whenever you like. They are often designed to counter specific enemy behaviours, and an opponent that initially seems impossible can often be defeated easily with a specific prosthetic attachment—shield enemies are comically rubbish once you find the axe attachment.

 

Sursa: pcgamer

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