You know what I love? Wendy’s. I unabashedly love it. I go there once a week and I always order the same thing: a double hot and juicy with no pickles. I love pickles too but that’s neither here nor there, folks. The fact of the matter is that it’s like a ritual for me. I love every aspect of it, including the drive there. Now what if there was some sort of horrid rule enforced on my weekly Wendy’s - say some type of obstacle. Let’s just say for the sake of this analogy I’m bumbling through here that I had to drive to Wendy’s while balancing a grain of rice on a tooth pick. For every time that I drop the grain of rice, my car is towed back at my house and my dashboard reads, “Fat chance, motherfucker! Do it again!” Eventually, I’d begin to question if the classic double was really worth it. Years later I would be found shambling around the parking lot of a Burger King, a shell of myself, talking to the french fry-laden bushes about bush stuff.
Titan Souls is sort of like this experience for me. It combines things that I love and does them in a way that feels like you’re part of some Soviet Union gymnastics team. Delineation to pattern is taboo, and while some of the one-shot-kill titans can allow a bit of mobility, the fights are either won in seconds or lost in seconds. Any fight that lasts longer than 10 seconds is just…no. It’s boring, you’re doing it wrong, you’ll probably die eventually, should I die? Should I just run into the boss and die? Sploot. Dead. Great.
Now instead of just letting you respawn outside the boss room or in the room itself, you have to run back to the boss room, which can take a few seconds but BELIEVE me when I say that this starts to feel like you’re slamming your dick into a car door repeatedly by the sixth fucking time, because the world is so vapid and bland that you hate, hate, HATE walking through it. It’s a critical problem with Titan Souls, because somewhere in between mixing Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and Zelda, the game stripped away not only the fun parts, but practically anything of praise. It’s woefully short, there’s no upgrade system or variety to the encounters, the world is more empty than Shadow of the Colossus (how the hell was this even possible?), and the fights are so short-lived that they leave no impression at all.
If this was maybe $5, I could possibly make some sort of case for trying it. It plays fine? It didn’t crash? The music is pretty? There’s clearly ideas in here worth exploring further but it’s just so far beyond dead in this iteration that I find it hard to give it any sort of praise, let alone recommendation. Just play Shovel Knight or Bastion or Axiom Verge. Do not pay $15 for this.
Grade: D
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