Review: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (Steam)

Carve your own clever path to vengeance in an all-new adventure from developer FromSoftware, creators of Bloodborne and the Dark Souls series. Take Revenge. Restore your honor. Kill Ingeniously.

Pros:

• Really good graphics.
• 15787mb Download size.
• Steam achievements.
• Controller support.
• HDR support.
• Graphics-Texture/lighting/volumetric/water surface/shader/reflections/shadow quality, SSAO, AA, Auto rendering adjustment, resolution and mode display.
• Can rebind keyboard, mouse and the controller.
• Invert axis and sensitivity slider.
• English and Japanese voice option.
• Tutorial type icons and pop-ups.
• Resurrection-when you die, you get at least one opportunity to ressurect there and then. You can build up additional ressurections.
• Sculpture idol-acts like the bonfires in Dark Souls, Here you can reset enemies, upgrade your character and buy new skills and items.
• Fast travel between any activated sculpture idol.
• Can pause the game!
• Swim, you can swim and this opens up the world even more.
• Actions-deflect, block, dodge, hook, counter, and jump.
• Coins-used to buy items. Drop from enemies and you pick them up by vacuuming them up like in Soul Reaver.
• Sen-exp bar that increases when you kill people.
• Death-you, lose half your Sen and coin and no way to get it back.
• Feels like a puzzle game! Work out who to take out first, a route to take, etc.
• Many enemy types like shielded enemies, enemies that alert others, ranged, melee and named stronger enemies.
• Posture-both you and the enemy have a posture bar, as you attack the enemy the bar fills and once full you do a critical instant kill.
• Tenchu mechanics, you can stealth around, use ledges and tools to evade the enemy.
• Stealth executions from ledge hang, behind and from hugging a wall.
• Massive boss fights and mini boss fights.
• Grappling hook- A cool new tool that adds verticality to the levels.
• Upgrade tree and skill to earn, you can grind out Sen and coins.
• A lot of free roam play.
• The prosthetics-your arm is a weapon and you can find new attachments for it and have 3 equipped to hot swap to. From firecrackers to axe to fire.
• Strong soundtrack.
• Love to hate the game.
• Tad difficult.
• Satisfying combat.
• No stamina bar so you can play it at flat out speeds.
• Some gorgeous locations.
• Every area has multiple routes and areas to find.
• Everyone will play and take a route differently.
• Dragon rot-the more you die, infects NPC and can have them coughing and splutter but more intentionally it hinders special missions popping.
• A lot of breakable environment parts.
• Clever Ai pathfinding.
• Practice area in the main hub against an undead Shinobi.
• Can peak around corners.

Cons:

• No benchmark test.
• Learning curve as you have to press a button to actually hang onto the ledge.
• Only the d-pad is used on the menu.
• Difficult.
• No quit and shutdown option I stead you in essence reboot the game then quit.
• Infuriating.
• The game doesn’t give much away.
• Just an FYI the game has no co-op.