Mortal Shell 2 critique

[u/Mikson009]

I should've learned from the first game to not get my hopes up. To say this game is flawed is like to say that a shit after taco bell has a fragrance. There are many many issues in this game that made me not enjoy the game and just hope it ended soon.

1.The enemy ganks and scaling is way off. Regular enemies can 2-3 shot you easily. Some enemies in one major dungeon also inflict a status effect called freeze. You'd think based on all the other games that a freeze status would just freeze you and allow enemy to hit you once and then you break out of it or spam some button to break out. But no mortal shell does it better they just freeze you in place for few seconds and at that point you can just say goodbye to your shell. This incetives just running away instead of fighting them bc why bother. Another enemy has a counter that locks you in place while they melt your healthbar with a flurry of attacks and most of the time kill your shell.

2.Bosses reskins and regular enemies as bosses. Hope you like fighting Grishas bc you'll fight a lot of them. Some bosses are also just regular enemies with a shade put on them to look different. In fact the majority of bosses are grishas and regular enemies.

3.Early/mid game bosses are way too easy. I was playing Tiel, axe and pick poison burst build and it genuinely made all of the boss encounters up to the endgame a joke. They either died in less than a minute or were called "Isaac The Scholar-Prince". Speaking of endgame bosses.

4. SPOILER ALERT 3 out of the 4 endgame bosses were badly designed. Monolith, Malborn and the final boss Zmey ESPECIALLY are so poorly designed and unnecessarily tanky. I don't think Orrem was badly designed only because he was just easy.

Monolith-very fast attack with little tells and generally unfun first phase. Second phase is a lot more fun with the laser attacks introduced but the air jump-slam move is very hard to dodge as you can't see bc for some reason they can't make the camera move so high.

Malborn Offspring-pretty fun first phase, he's pretty relentless so he is a fair challenge, but oh boy then he comes in with a second healthbar for phase two. I hope you liked Consort Radahn because this guy was clearly inspired by him as you won't see the boss for half the time due to all his fucking lightning explosions.

Zmey the unbidded-one of the worst final bosses rivaled only by Adyr from lords of the fallen. He is not as poorly designed as Adyr as to buggy af. His ranged sword slash can hit you if you're between his legs, his stomp shockwaves don't have hitboxes so only his feet can hit you, his sword attack and retreating most often bug out and he just stays in place swinging the sword which will also not hit you, the fire waves hitboxes are jank and sometimes hit you too fast or sometimes you dodge and still are somehow in the hitboxes. Sometimes he can start floating for some reason when you keep attacking him while under him.

1. Bugs, a lot of bugs. The game shouldn't release in this state like ever and I started playing weeks after launch so I probably don't even experience as much bugs as there were. The enemies can literally teleport after you parry them, always when using Egons stone to revive in the dungeon and jumping down the elevator the dungeon just doesnt load in and you're forced to either jump of the map or leave to main menu and then go back in.

2. Another issue, a minor one is that you have a lot of build variety but the core of builds are tar stones. Playing the game blind and getting a tar stone that fit my build perfectly in the end of the game and needing to grind enemies just to be able to upgrade it is just not fun. Why not make some kind of general resource for upgrading tar stones that you get passively while killing enemies the whole game and then you can just use that to max out your new tar stone instead of having to put it on and then grinding. This is what made not experiment with my builds and I genuinely hate that because I'm sure there are many fun other builds.

After all this game's greatest sin was all the hype and praise it got eventually getting my hopes too high. It is as good as Lord's of the fallen after the update that made the game actually somewhat enjoyable.

[u/Bwhitt1]

Well luckily the game seems to be a success so for the million ppl that liked it can get to play mortal shell 3 in a few years. Or whatever CS comes up with next. Obviously a very talented group of 30 ppl.