When I played the Alpha, there were a lot of things to love -- ammo was plentiful, health was a bit scarce, and the enemies and environment were enthralling. Everything was challenging and precise, and the first boss, while he had some pretty crazy issues, was very very exciting and fun.
Fast forward about 15 hours, and man this game just isn't as good.
Bloodborne absolutely NAILS the explore/reward aspect of the Souls games, but in everything else, it completely falls apart.
Your parry relies on you using a firearm -- which would be fine, is you weren't limited to a total of 20 shots for your gun, and if ammo wasn't rarer than water in the desert. To "make up" for this, you can give up a large chunk of your HP (for me, it's about 40% -- I have to immediately heal after using it) to gain 5 "blood" bullets, which do more damage than normal bullets. You can only have a max of 5 of these, so your grand total of bullets is 25.
25 times to parry, assuming you do it right, because some enemies have un-parryable attacks, or the parrying frames is inconsistent with them. Some bosses feel completely random, with my parrying working at one specific time, and then being completely ineffective the next. There's also the fact that despite having guns, actually using guns for a "ranged" build, or a ranged option of dealing with enemies, as was so integral to the earlier souls games, is completely useless here, as your guns do have a maximum range, and even if you focus on the "Skill" stat, your guns damage will be hilariously low.
Add in to this that they completely removed magic, and it makes you scratch your head when the "magic alternative" use bullets as well. They WANT you to go purely melee in this game, and then punish you for it. Bosses no longer telegraph their moves, they just suddenly attack, requiring you to stay back a good ways and watch their pattern, twiddling your thumbs a mile away while you wait for an opening. Heaven forbid you try to play aggressively against bosses -- the point I'm currently at, the boss will do a grab move that instantly kills you. His damage from the grab + the fact that he poisons you, means by the time my "falling to the ground and standing up" animation is over, I'm dead.
My ranged options for this fight are molotovs, which do decent damage, but you can only carry 10 of them at a time, and they miss fast moving enemies incredibly easily, making them unreliable. Summoning NPC's for help is a limited option, as you need a currency called "Insight" in order to summon anyone for help, and that's a VERY limited resource. I currently only have 14 (I had about 18 when I started trying this fight) and there's no way for me to farm anymore at my current position in the game, as you only gain more by seeing a boss the first time, and then by defeating a boss, or by picking up very rare items.
Everything in the game is a very scarce resource, and the bugs/issues with the game (a boss I'm stuck fighting apparently has i-frames, or his hitbox dissappears during the fight, as I can't hit him with my attacks at all while he's wailing on a specific NPC) and I've had incredibly powerful NPC enemies kill me through the floor. 1 hit from them took off 60% of my hp, which would be fine if I could dodge his attacks, but he since he hit me through the floor, I didn't really have a choice.
The idea that every death means I'll have to spend 20 to 30 minutes grinding the same enemies for enough souls to buy back the items I wasted is far more punishing than the few thousand blood echoes I lost when I died. Every item in the game is incredibly expensive compared to how little currency you're given, and you're just supposed to deal. My only grinding route I can access gives me 4000 blood echoes, and molotovs are 700. I can get 4 molotovs per run, and leveling is even worse.
It just doesn't feel as much like as souls game as I thought it would, and it most definitely doesn't play like one. The abundance of aggression makes the game incredibly difficult, especially since there's no way to attack enemies from afar.
It just plays far more like an action game than a souls game, and that's really off putting. I'm not sure if I can heavily recommend this game anymore.
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