Content from Last 48hrs

Onimusha: Way of the Sword I went into this one with pretty high expectations. I was basically hoping for Samurai Resident Evil 4. And that's not too far off from what the game ended up being. Roughly half of the game is linear areas that are structured pretty much like in RE4. The other half is spent running around Eastern Kyoto doing side-quests, finding secrets and unlocking new sections of the map as you progress through the story. That second half is the weakest aspect of the game. It's fine but it gets kind of repetitive after a while. The entire map looks very samey and after a while you run out of new things to do, so you just end up repeating the same kind of missions. If they make a sequel, I really hope they'll take the time to make the side-content meatier and add more variety to the map. The combat is where the game really shines, though. Combat against basic enemies is way too easy early on but once you start running into bosses it's a completely different game. This is the most satisfying sword combat I've played since Sekiro. It's nowhere near as difficult and it's definitely not a souls-like. But once you've got a boss' pattern down, it gets into a very similar rhythm where it almost feels like a rhythm game. Parry a few attacks to enter the blaze state, then start deflecting attacks to chip away at their stamina bar and once that's depleted you get an opening to hit them with an Issen Break attack that takes a huge chunk of their health bar. There's a training room you can go into to replay the tutorials and rematch all the bosses and I think the biggest compliment I can give to the game is that I almost always went in there for the rematch immediately after beating a new boss in the story. It was just so satisfying to fight them again after mastering their moveset and just wipe the floor with them. Especially the ones that gave me trouble in the story. Even when the early game bosses start being re-used as minibosses later on in the game, it never bothered me to fight them again. And now that I'm done, I can't wait to jump into new game plus on Carnage difficulty and do it all over again. So yeah, that's another banger from Capcom. At this point that's like 3 GOTY contenders from them this year. If it wasn't for GTA 6, I'd say they have it on lockdown...