Blasphemous

It so happened that I got acquainted with the first part of Blasphemous when all the add-ons and DLC had already been released, but I fell in love with this game with all my heart. I beat the game the first time to the good ending and then beat the game again on NG+ with all the DLC features and the true ending. So it's no surprise that Blasphemous 2 was my most anticipated game this year. I completed blasphemous 2 for both endings 100% and I can safely say that the second part is much worse than the first. No, don't think so! Blasphemous 2 is still a great game and I recommend it to everyone, but if Blasphemous 1 is a 10/10, then Blasphemous 2 is a swing between 7 and 8, so 7.5. And all because throughout the entire game the feeling of hackwork and commercialization did not leave me. If the developers had spent a little more time, they would definitely have created a masterpiece. In my review, I will not describe the undeniable advantages of the game (visual style, music, etc.), since the entire Internet is teeming with this, but I will list the disadvantages that turned out to be fatal for me. 1) The very first disappointment in the game is finishing off enemies. If in the first part each type of enemy had its own unique, juicy and meaty finishing move, then in the second part I counted only 4 cool finishing animations. Alas, in the second part there is a feeling of hackwork and monotony; most of the enemies have standard animation when they are entwined with roots. These juicy finishing moves in the first part literally left goosebumps on the skin and added fuel to the fire of the desire to finish off the enemy in a unique way; I wanted to finish off all types of enemies in order to see all the animations. In the second part, I found a new unit, saw again and again the standard animation with roots and felt disappointed. 2) The complexity of the game has dropped noticeably, the transition to casual is for the general public, and this is directly related to commercial success, since nowadays there are a lot of whiners who don’t want to put effort and ingenuity into games, they want to bend over and be indestructible, but poorly not this, but the fact that for hardcore players there is no banal choice of difficulty level and the game has ceased to tickle the nerves or evoke the joy of victory, since victories are too easy. And the first thing that affects this is that you can make mistakes with impunity. For example, falling on spikes or into an abyss is no longer fatal and this is a fatal mistake, since now you don’t need to memorize the platforming, you don’t need to try and there is no worry at all, which means that the game has become much weaker emotionally than the first part. The enemies deal very little damage compared to the first part, so you don’t need to study the enemies’ techniques and try to block or parry their attacks, you can just chop cabbage and drink cans, which restore an unrealistic amount of health. Oooh, but if you take the Mace, then you don’t have to be afraid of anything at all, the damage is unrealistically high at the start of the game with a huge damage radius. Enemies won’t even be able to reach you with an attack, but you can, and you can also hit them through walls, floors and other textures and then brag to your friends that you completed Blasphemous 2. Even the bosses, except Eviterno, don’t cause much problems. Therefore, having a choice of difficulty for a game where spikes kill and enemies punish would not be at all superfluous. 3) Perhaps NG+ will be added in the future, but its absence has become the cornerstone of replayability for me. After completing the game, which took me about a week, all that remains is to delete the game, since there is nothing else to do in it.