Paul the sparky wrote:

By combos, were talking like a swift 1-2, not chaining loads of hits right?

With stance switching you can feasibly chain like 10-20 hits.

Try, light, hard, light, kick, switch to low stance, light, hard, light then the jump slash

Or 

light, hard, light, kick, switch into high stance, light, moon slash

I still haven't played it, unlikely to now until Sunday.

nice. game look pretty

When you've done a move, your stamina bar turns white. If you stance change, you instantly regain that stamina, otherwise any other input will see it disappear. You can use that to get more attacks out of your stamina bar, the easiest way being switching down from heavy, to mid, to light during a combo.

R1 and the triangle for heavy, square for mid, x for light

Yeha. Seems you can just press R1 at the end of a combo to regain the stamina too, but I prefer switching stance. Nice to know there is the option though.

Found what I think is the end of the demo.

You get like 100 swords though so nay bother

(It's ridiculous)

Never played Dark Souls or anything like it, so apologies for the simpleton questions, but do enemies not stay dead in this?  Or are they revived by praying at a shine?  I mopped up five or six opponents, wandered around a bit (thought the shrine might save progress?), then they were all back in their original positions.

Cheers.  I sort of get it, I think.  The combat is satisfying as it's so tense - the Ninja Gaiden thing about the simplest of foes having the ability to catch you off guard, which was never really true, is certainly the case here.  So aside from short cuts, are you effectively starting afresh with each death, or do you retain loot/character levels?  One last question: what's the deal with the wolf you leave on the spot where you fall, I assume the aim is to get back to it each time?  Didn't think I'd like this sort of thing, but there's a chance.

So the wolf thing is a bit like getting one shot at your dropped gems in Shovel Knight.  Gotcha.

Even though I didn't really get anywhere last night, it's fair to say that this has wormed its way under my skin based on the combat alone.  I guess this is how these games (what are they called anyway?  Dark Souls like doesn't cut it if the basics are being copied and pasted elsewhere) get their claws into you.

One more session, then a pre-order, I think.

Tried out switching from the frenzied flurries of low to a triple middle, makes short work of the spear wielder.  Early days yet though.

No, not really. But it scratches an itch. I used to really enjoy Onimusha back in the day, and I like games about Samurai that have interesting combat, like Way of the Samurai. That said, it's got a lot of issues. Combat is on the wrong side of difficult, and they could do with tweaking it a little.

The Diablo style item drops are fine by me, but the need to make it so that you aren't always getting 100 pieces of armour, and so that it's easier to get repairs or upgrades to bits of gear. Burning through twenty hats in a level feels stupid, especially when it sees you ditch a cool purple with lots of cool buffs for a white weapon just because its raw damage is really high.

Certain enemies also like to do grabs that pop right through their stagger state and through your hurtbox which isn't a huge amount of fun to deal with.

Hopefully the full game ends up being a bit more tweaked, but if you like Onimusha, combat with a lot of depth, and something that's sadistically challenging, then I imagine there will be a lot to like. It's rare that a game makes fighting an armoured soldier and two militia feel like it can go either way, which is something special.

Could be, stuff breaks fast though and repair items are limited to 9 of each type