Originally planned for release back in August on Switch, Decay of Logos was delayed by its developers in order to fix some issues with the game on Nintendo's platform. We played this original version back at the time and found it seriously lacking, suffering from a crushing number of gameplay bugs, some terribly muddy graphics and a dire framerate that made the whole thing pretty much unplayable. Now Decay of Logos is back and, although it's clear that Amplify Creations have worked hard to sort out the problems we encountered first time around, this is still a game that performs poorly and has a number of problems that, when added together, make it virtually impossible to recommend.
Decay of Logos is an action-RPG that's very much in the Dark Souls mould, with the very same set-up in terms of how you perish and are resurrected at your last resting place, inching your way slowly through enemy and trap-filled levels, dying constantly, learning from your mistakes and repeating in order to progress. You assume the role of Ada who survives an assault on her village at the start of the game that sees it razed to the ground and her family murdered. From here, you set out into the mysterious world in search of answers with your companion elk by your side. The first moments with the game do feel pretty interesting; this is a world that's begging to be explored and is full of secrets and lore to discover, but the sheer number of annoying gameplay bugs and bad design decisions crush any sense of adventure or fun out of the venture almost immediately.
There are a handful of positives to mention before we get to all the negative stuff, though. The extra time in the oven here has resulted in Decay of Logos looking much better than it did when we first got our hands on it; there's more detail in characters and buildings, lighting effects have been improved across the board and it's much easier to navigate your way around the world in general as things are much less blurred and muddy looking. The framerate has also been slightly improved; it still stutters and is overall nowhere near as smooth as it needs to be, especially in combat, but it's much, much better than it was back in August. However, beyond this, things haven't really improved as much as they needed to; this is still a game that's a frustrating nightmare to spend time with and it's actually pretty hard to know where to start listing all the problems present.
Let's start with your mount. In Decay of Logos, you have a companion elk. This noble looking creature must be fed lullaberries in order to keep it calm so you can ride it, and its stress levels rise very quickly – especially around enemies – so you'll need to keep plenty of berries on you for this very anxious boy. It's a reasonable enough idea and we guess they were shooting for a sort of Last Guardian-style deal here, except that nothing about the game feels like it's designed with riding a mount in mind. Levels aren't generally big enough to require a faster means of transport, you spend a lot of time inside buildings and climbing around platforms and you'll generally mostly forget your companion is even there – except for when you need it to help you open a door.
Yes, the only time you really need your elk is when you're required to direct it onto a platform in order to use its weight to open a door barring your progress. It's a tedious idea, made worse by the fact that simply riding this animal in a straight line – or having it come to you when you call it without it becoming snagged on some scenery – is a near impossibility. It's a gimmick shoe-horned into the game that does it absolutely no favours. Getting off your mount is also finicky and you'll be presented with a "cannot dismount here" message repeatedly in situations where you're not in combat or hindered by anything else. It's a mess.
Away from your execrable mount, the core combat feels sluggish, partly because of the framerate and partly because of some pretty noticeable input lag. Your attacks and dodges are badly animated, regularly take too long to happen and see you getting sliced and diced through no fault of your own. Enemies also tend to dish out and take completely random amounts of damage, sometimes you'll hammer an opponent or take tiny amounts of damage from their attacks, sometimes the exact same enemy will hit you once and end you on the spot - and dying is something you really want to avoid in Decay of Logos because of the shambling mess of inadvisable systems the developers have added to it here.
When you die you are returned to the last place you prayed or rested at – just like in Dark Souls – but here your base stats – defence, attack and so on – will take a hit, making you weaker in battle until you find somewhere to sleep in order to restore them to their maximum values. Your stats will continue to decrease every time you die, eventually to the point of seriously affecting your ability to deal with enemies, and so this results in a gameplay loop that sees you constantly trying to find somewhere to sleep in order to be at optimal strength in battle; a frustrating scenario that's exacerbated massively by the fact that when you do sleep. you run the risk of being ambushed and killed. It's a ludicrous idea and a really bad design decision; you'll be set upon by at least three enemies when you're ambushed and stand little to no chance of beating them. Moreover, there's no actual point in even trying as, if you let them kill you and then just sleep again, chances are you'll not get ambushed and have your stats refilled anyway. It's completely pointless, frustrating and farcical.
Another huge combat-related annoyance is the fact that, unlike Dark Souls' Estus flask which refills every time you rest and gives you a reliable source of HP to factor into your tactics while making your way through levels, in Decay of Logos you must rely on health drops. This means you'll often find yourself in a situation where you have no way to refill your health as the required potion doesn't drop with nearly enough regularity, so you keep dying, your core stats weaken so you die even more, you go to sleep and get ambushed; die, rinse and repeat. It's a garbage setup that makes progress feel like a bitter, horrible experience.
There are holes and chasms littered around levels, and especially in dark caves, that you just cannot see until you've fallen down them, something that happens all the time. Fall damage is extreme and you can lose a huge chunk of your life bar by jumping off low platforms, forcing you to use ladders, which feel clumsy and slow. Boss battles are hideous affairs, with the sluggish combat and nonsensical enemy damage output meaning you'll spend a lot of time getting one-shotted and having to run the gauntlet time after time until you finally get lucky.
The camera, when locked on to enemies – especially bees – has a tendency to spin wildly out of control when you get up close and personal, and it often refuses to lock on to targets until you're so close that they've seen you coming, making stealth a messy prospect. We also noticed that running through areas to avoid enemies results in the entire level's worth of bad guys chasing after you; they never let it go and have no boundaries at which they give up the chase, so if you try to dash through an area, expect to accrue quite an entourage by the time you've got to where you're going. We should probably also mention the fact that levelling-up in this RPG happens completely automatically and largely unseen, so you have absolutely no control over your character build or stat progression.
Honestly. We could continue to point out problems here, there are just so many; even little things like lighting a torch from a flame often doesn't work properly, the game refusing to recognise your inputs on time. It's not often a game comes along that has so many problems barring you from enjoying almost any aspect of its gameplay, and as much as we tried with this one, the fact is that Decay of Logos is simply badly designed. It performs terribly, looks awful for the most part and is, in summary, pretty much impossible to recommend on any level whatsoever.
Conclusion
Decay of Logos is a mess. It looks bad, has some crippling performance issues and is stuffed full of nonsensical and overly-punitive gameplay systems that make every minute you spend with it feel like a slog. The world that Amplify Creations has created here does occasionally feel like it could be an interesting and worthwhile place to explore, but there are just far too many bugs and problems that get in the way of you settling down to enjoy this game in any way whatsoever. Avoid.
Comments 37
Owwww, yeah I kept hearing people warning about this game. Sad to see it wasn't fixed.
So sad... I've really had high hopes for this one to overcome the initial launch flaws. Guess I'll be buying Ashen instead.
Looks like cross between Souls And BORF then.
pass
Oh a smash hit in the making
Wow. The art design alone had me interested in this game. Then I opened this article and saw all the fuzzy screenshots. What a shame.
@Lord
It's utterly smashing !
I'm with you on this one PJ!! Pretty, pretty, pretty bad!
This game looked awful from the jump
I never understand the point in rereleasing unchanged, universally detested games months after they're released on other platforms . . . They hated your game first time round ... they hate it even more now. Stop wasting your time you seriously untalented devs ... I don't usually make it personal but it really is cynical knowing you've created a real turkey and continue selling it (without even trying to improve it) to kids and unsuspecting, naive parents who may barely have enough cash for 1-2 games a year.
@SwitchedOn_Games Awful!
@fluggy That's not really fair. I've followed the development of this game pretty closely and the developers have worked super hard to iron out the flaws. Sure, maybe they've failed, but that doesn't make them scumbugs deserving your hatred.
Why I rather just play actual FromSoftware games elsewhere than stuck with "games like dark souls" on Switch
I can get the entire Dark Souls collection for less than what Nintendo charges for cardboard and RingFit - all stuff I can only "play" at home anyway.
@sketchturner
When you have no quality control, u obviously know a games is a broken mess, release it anyway, do nothing to fix it, release the same broken mess 4 months later on another system!!! If "they failed to iron out the flaws, "DON'T RERELEASE IT ON ANOTHER SYSTEM!!! Its called integrity, its the EASIEST thing to maintain and almost impossible to recover once you've lost it! Its perfectly fair to be disgusted by abhorrent, cynical practices ... whats not fair is little Timmy, waking up on Christmas day with the single game his parents could afford ... and getting stuck with this trash coz his Mum thought it looked good. Games like this that are universally maligned should come with a warning sticker!
Wow. Thanks for a well written and concise review PJ. Sorry you had to 'experience' this game. It's such a crying shame that something that could have, with a little more time, been a game worth looking at. Instead the devs decide they'll push it out the door in the hope that people will buy it on a whim. It frustrates me that devs don't have enough pride in their games to actually finish them to a degree of acceptable completion.
Shame. Ashen it is.
Strictly placing blame on the devs ignores the fact that there's a publisher involved, too. The devs don't necessarily have the luxury of not releasing a game in order to preserve integrity. There was certainly effort that went into improving the game. Clearly they fell well short and clearly the game deserves a low score. But look up any episode of "What Happened?" on Matt McMuscles' YT channel and you will see there is almost always a lot more to the story of a failed game than many in this comment section are assuming.
This reminds me of my deer companion that traveled with when I was lost in Yosemite park. I had to kill him to fend of the COPPAS.
The title should had been change to Delay of Legolas and we wouldn't know the difference.
Oof. Was upping this wouldn’t be total carp.
Guess I’ll be saving some money.
First, this game was developed by what, 5 people. It’s not going to be nearly as good as dark souls. It’s over priced and I am waiting for a sale, but I know I can over look a lot of what the reviewer complains about. Framerate issues are not acceptable in my opinion. Outside that, other poor gameplay choices/pacing/gimmicks etc... you have to remember that is not developed with the same budget and teams that these AAA games are and that is why I will wait for a sale on this. Maybe some of the other issues are fixed too. Lower graphic settings to smooth out frame rate and it sounds like a 6/10 to me. Which seeing that I’m working on my 5th dark souls playthrough on switch, and like 8th of botw, I’m ok with playing something else too. Witcher has been great too
Oh look, NL gives another game 8 or 9 out of ten! I'm outraged. They must be biased! or sponsored! or communists! or aliens! Ah, hang on.
Oooof liked the sound of it. Nature and mystery... but this looks really awful. I'll stay clear.
My thing is- I just don't understand how a dev team would look at this and say 'Yep, let's ship it boys!". I mean, it's VERY obviously bad, and they'd HAVE to know that. I just don't get how this happens I guess.
@GhostGeneration Think about it like this: You are a small game developer. You have spent an enormous amount of time and effort making a game, and you've had to do it while burning through savings or possibly money others have invested in your eventual product. The money is about to run dry, and there isn't more on the way, but the game's not done. In fact, it's a mess. With a few month's work, you think you could get it into a semi-playable form, but it'll be very obviously bad and you know it. What do you do? Do you cancel the project, or do you release the game and hope to recoup even part of the sunk cost and/or debt you've incurred in making it?
A large company with multiple projects and a big pile of treasure from past successes can probably afford to delay a game longer and make it better. A small team might not have that luxury.
@NoxAeturnus That's true, I just think these things would have been SUPER obvious and it would have been readily apparent that vastly more time was needed. Now, it'll go down in history as a bad game, and for better or worse that team's artistic vision won't be fully realized. Just a shame, but I do understand that perspective.
@GhostGeneration Certainly a shame. As someone who regularly bites off more than they can chew, I sympathize with them.
@Kalmaro yeah.... I have heard they brought out quite a lot of Updates on PS4 and so and looked waaay better now, hoped the Switch version would start right out with the updated one so it won't that big of a mess but... well too bad
Needs alot of work here. Give it to the team at Witcher 3.
@MisterDevil Don't see why they couldn't. The updates are there, they just have to bring them over.
Oh well, I'm not a programmer so maybe it's just THAT complicated?
@giantenemycrab The developers are responsible for budget, scope, and project management so I’d say most of the blame lies with them. It seems they tried to do much more than they could realistically do with the budget they had
Bummer. Early reviews of Pine also aren’t promising. It’s a shame that more indie developers aren’t scoring hits with 3D games.
Sad. I wish they did more with the elk. “Souls like” but with mounted combat would be great. Especially when it’s so basic in Breath of the Wild.
Clearly you didn't play the game. I have tested the new version on switch and its really improved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGvfAdqBJzI
@MisterDevil I think its not as bad as they painted, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxeVBSRfVsg saw some videos and looks cool. They also release a lot of updates on the other platforms and the game is much better and enjoyable
@Ufuso yeah I know about the updates on other consoles, is it also for the switch? Because if it is I might grab it then, it would be a sign from their side, that they will keep on improving the game so it might one day reach the status of fluently playable.
I don't understand turkish so the vid was a little help but it does look waaaay more fluent than when it first came out. Thanks
@Kalmaro well I can imagine that they still had to do some changes like downgrading or adapting it for the Switch hardware but yeah... it can't be that hard for them if they are in fact being able to port the whole game over....
The world looked pretty interesting from the first announcement screenshot and video (even some of the screenshots in this article, despite the blurriness), sad to see this is the state
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