I didn't know this. Now I'm worried. I initially thought, how could you fail? This coming from a guy who has seen none of the footage and going in with blind faith.
I don't know, man. The game doesn't look good. I mean, it LITERALLY doesn't look good. The concept art was gorgeous and if they had gone the hand-drawn look I would at least be interested in the visuals. But the gameplay isn't stellar either and the level design is garbage.
Then, of course, there's also the fact that Inafune went back to Kickstarter to try to get MORE money for DLC. That was a low blow.
The game looked pretty mediocre in the Kickstarter Beta, but bear in mind that was 6 months ago and games
usually look like crap until their final month or two of development. That was the case with every (sports) game I worked on when I was at EA, so I'm not really worried about the visuals.
No, what worried me about the Beta were that the controls flat-out
did not work (literally, you'd press a button on the controller, and the game would think you were pressing a completely different button) and that the moment-to-moment gameplay was extremely abstract and unsatisfying. The main hook of the gameplay is shooting enemies enough to put them into a dazed state, and then dashing through them to acquire a temporary stat modifier on your main weapon. In theory, I suppose this would make the "fun" a kind of score attack/rush-style experience where you're chaining enemies together using each of their stat boosts in sequence. However, in my experience (with the exception of the anti-armor stat booster) you really couldn't feel a distinct difference between the boosts and the shooting was generally unsatisfying.
It's also worth noting that the
extremely hard bosses in the demo had to be beaten by knocking enough health off them to put them into a dazed state. Then you had to dash
near them (not "through" them, because then you'd hurt yourself) to make that health loss permanent (otherwise, they'd regenerate it completely after a few seconds). It was extremely frustrating and not at all fun.
Like I said, if that Beta was indicative of the final product that game is a mess.