Absolute first impression: Wait for a sale and patches.

The worst of the modern From Games.
In my books Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne are the pinnacle of what From has pushed out. I hated my time with DS3 to such an extent that I consider the game a broken piece of garbage that should not have been made. Sekiro is fast approaching that level of disdain.
It's fast paced swordfighting game that features a dishonored shinobis quest for redemption and vengeance. Sounds like Tenchu? Unfortunately it's not, not even close.

Sekiro is very modern - taking elements from Assassins Creed and Shadows of Mordor by enabling the use of the environment, minor stealth elements a skill tree that slowly opens up to add more flexibility to your apporaches (or so it might seem) and combat system that borrows from the fighting game triangle of block-throw-punch. It just doesn't seem our hero can do any throwing.

The innovations in the fighting system are where my gripes with Sekiro come into play. The game basically features two "health" systems - one for poise and one for vitality or actual health. There are two ways to defeat enemies, either by plainly depleting their health or by depleting their poise and causing an execution attack to trigger. The only way to defeat bosses is to execute them x amounts of times, which means you need to deplete their poise. Poise and vitality do overlap to an extent, as depleting vitality will make regaining poise harder and slower. Poise can be depleted either by striking the enemy, forcing them to block or by performing parries. Sounds good? It's not really that in game, as parrying is a major focus of the game, to an extent that makes mobility based gameplay seem bad.

The majority of your time in Sekiro is spent parrying everything from arrows to kicks to swords and to axes. Either you master the parry mechanic or you leave to play another game. Dodging has been reduced to a minor sidestep that offers no invincibility, making it unreliable. The unreliability of the dodge is further emphasized by enemy attack homing, which can cause some major headaches. Enemies change course mid-move if you didn't dodge JUST in the right window. Some attacks like sweeps and throws need to be dodged or jumped which further helps to emphasize the bad dodge, as sometimes enemies will just keep homing to you no matter your inputs. And when they hit, they hit HARD.

There are no real RPG mechanics that previous Fom Software games have had. Instead we get slowly unlocking skills that serve no real purpose but to add minor and quite frankly boring things to our protagonists arsenal. An ability to parry spears? Ok, sounds good. Howabout an additional ONE shuriken? Or making bad stealth just slightlty worse? Not so much. You can also equip a single special strike that is usually just worse than slashing away with your sword.

And slashing you will do, since there are apparently no other weapons to be had in the game. Just your single sword with approximately three different attacks. Either you dodge and attack, stab or slash. For the entire game. No variations here, unless you go for the backstab, which is a good idea usually since it instantly kills the enemy.

Which brings us to stealth. The game offers you the ability to crouch and stealthily move through the stages, but it rarely works that well. See, the enemies can sometimes spot you even if you are behind obstacles or on rooftops and in stealth. What do you do then? You wait or engage. Most enemies I've encountered thus far have very little ability to follow you onto high ground, so waiting out the surprisingly long aggro timers is the only way to try out another stealth kill. There's very little space to juke the enemies or try interesting places to hide in (AC and Tenchu had stuff like this, why is there stealth in the game when it works so poorly). At least you can stab some bosses, so that's a plus.

And a sense of wonder and exploration is what I feel Sekiro is missing. For fans of Dark Souls (I guess most people looking into Sekiro are) I would assume that the feeling of exploring the world is a big thing, and helped them to get over the initial speedbumps that the mechanical difficulty of the games presented. Sekiros world doesn't really seem to be that gripping, partially because it's mirroring ours very closely. And partially because feudal Japan is a place that has become more "known" through other IPs. It's not an ugly world or one bereft of cool details, but it's still not as interesting or as unique as what the soulsborne series has offered us. Or other games for that matter.


In conclusion, playing Sekiro feels like playing a bastard child of Nioh, Dark Souls 3 and AC/Shadow of Mordor but without their innovations or flair. Nioh had stances, varied weapons, spells, upgrades, stats and whatnot. AC and SoM have vast worlds and lore to help with the immersion. What does Sekiro have? Confined level design, confused power fantasy and constricted design in combat. It's a step backwards for From Software.

- Bad stealth. Enemy spotting ranges feel weird and defy conventions, juking enemies is just plain boring and the whole thing seems like an afterthought. For a stealthy shinobi, Wolf really needs to brawl it out a lot of times.
- Weird hitboxes. Enemies will home in on you and hit you at weird angles, even when your character is not colliding with their weapons or limbs.
- Bad camera (but good compared to some From games). Lock-on seems to have the same issues that their previous titles had, dropping randomly when a mobile enemy makes the camera glitch and be unable to move. This can cause interesting situations where your back becomes exposed because the camera can't decide which way to face.
- Absolutely meh combat. Think Dark Souls meets Shadow of Mordor. You will be very familiar with the parry button and with little else.
- Combat arts seem very useless
- Prosthetic tools are very much useless unless you use them EXACTLY as the game wants you to.
- Boss and miniboss battles feel drawn out - enemies are very lethal but your katana is a pool noodle?
- Mediocre keyboard controls. Targeting system is garbage and afaik can't be rebound on M&K
- weapons? Why can't our valiant hero use a spear? Or a knife? Or anything aside a pool noodle?
- It's hard (yeah yeah git gud blah blah)
- The sprint-out time feels super off and the buffering of inputs seem to sometimes eat mouse presses. Dodging and attack only to have your counter attack input just not register seems to be happening more than I'd like.

+ Looks ok. Lighting is pretty damn nice at places.
+ Suprisingly stable performance for a From Software PC port. GTX1080, i7-6600, 16gb ram and installed on SSD.
+ It's hard. If you like parry-based combat, Sekiro is probably gonna be a good game for you!
+ Rebindable keys...mostly. Can't seem to find a way to rebind enemy selection away from mouse movement (console ports yay), but otherwise fine.
+ You can change the button prompts! At leat the game recognizes that there are different types of controllers available in the world. Interestingly the default prompts are for controller, not for m+kb.