My Review of the Demo

As a huge Gothic fan, this demo seriously disappointed me and this is coming from someone who didn't have very high hopes to begin with.

Ups:

- Game looks good when it actually runs.

- Kai Rosenkranz is a genius.

Downs:

- Game is badly optimized, though I'd mostly blame UE5 for that. KCD2 ran well on Medium - High settings on my GTX 970 without visual glitches or frame drops, while looking better than this game's graphics at Alkimia Overdose, in my opinion. This game, however, struggles to stay at 30 FPS with the lowest graphics preset I can select and the Resolution Scale halved, while getting frequent visual glitches and frame drops. No need to comment on how it runs perfectly on your RTX XXXX, this is mostly a complaint about the fact that the game's made in UE5 instead of a better engine.

- Very amateurish/unrealistic feel to animations. Look at Kirgo as he's mining, for example.

- The whole combat system just feels so clumsily made... Staggers don't exist, hitboxes suck and the AI sucks. The 2 attacks from the 2 'sets' (LMB + RMB, Q + E) also start looping into each other by themselves if you spam one attack once you level up fighting. My complaint about animations extends here as well. Not because the first 'levels' of combat animations make you look inexperienced (which is how it's meant to be), but because the animations have absolutely no weight to them. It's just not fun.

- In true Gothic fashion, the control scheme also sucks.

- Clunky and slow movement.

- Very weird gameplay decisions, such as Bezi throwing the torch you have equipped on the ground if you try to do ANYTHING with it equipped (including unequipping it), with it just sticking there flame-side up no matter the surface. Dropping items just makes you piss them out, flapping physics are weird, etc.. Text gradually appearing during dialogue instead of being there from the start for you to read is also questionable, in my opinion, among other things they added... These are mostly nitpicks though.

- From a technical standpoint, I experienced quite a few random bugs. For a 3 year-old Demo, I'd expect it to be more polished than this.

Overall, 4/10. I've seen a lot of people praise the writing, but I think it's way too early for that, because we haven't seen a single quest from the actual game yet so there's nothing to praise.

Elex with Gothic undertones.