I have talked in the last two posts about Another Crab’s Treasure by Aggro Crab. I’ve been calling it a sekiro-lite rather than a soulslike, but now I want to call it Secrabo. Someone in the RKG Discord called it Crabiro, which I will also accept.
First, I have been doing my gun run after doing an area the old-fashioned way. This has gone off the rails beacuse there are two ways to go at a certain point, and because I was able to kill the boss that you’re just supposed to run from (in The Sands Between, which by the way, is very on the nose. In Elden Ring, you are traversing The Lands Between) in my gun run, I was able to explore The Sands Between at my leisure. Except for the really fucking irritating sand worms that break any shell if they pop up and hit you. Yes, they are buried in the sand and only pop up when you walk over them. There’s a way to tell where they are, but it’s not easy to focus on them and shoot them when they sudderly pop up in that manner.
Which, you might say, well that’s part of using the gun. Yes and no. It’s indicative of how slavishly the devs are hewing to the From games in certain ways (there is a similar type worm in the first Dark Souls), but then ups the ante by making it so they hit incredibly hard.
Side note: Using the gun has made me see the flaws even more clearly. It’s hard to tell when you’re locked on and when you’re not, which is very important on the gun run. Obviously, if you’re not locked on, then the gun is useless. But, man, the camera makes things so fucking hard. I’m glad I turned off fall damage at least. No way I would have made it through the platforming hell of the last two areas without it.
Here’s the honest truth for me and this game. The combat is just not good enough. It’s loose and janky, and it’s hard to see what you are hitting when you’re constantly clipping through the environments.
Aggro Crab has incorporated the ‘let’s throw a ton of enemies in the area to artificially increase the diffculty’. And, yes, that includes snipers, which frustrates the fuck out of me. The seahorses shoot gunk at you that knocks you backwards–which often means off the ledges.
I ran into a field boss on my real playthrough that made me just roll my eyes. He wasn’t hard, per se, but he was annoying. There is a status effect called gunk that if your meter fills it, ah, not really sure, but I think it slows you down dramatically and drains your health–slowly. And there are swamps of it, which, I mean.