Hi guys, I'm on the west coast, got up bright and semi-early at 6:30 to hop on and try the game out. Here's my first thoughts. I'm keeping in mind that this is an alpha, and that I've only had a little over an hour of play.

Combat: Awesome, super fun. Responsive, inherently challenging. At any given time in a battle there are many ways to make the next step, many different attacks or repositioning maneuvers to consider. There are just as many ways to get yourself hurt or killed as well, so it's absolutely not just a button-spam. The AI is quite good, challenging, a little predictable (in duels they would always sprint at you and generally do a guard break immediately), but they're AI bots, so with that in mind they're actually quite great. Bots kicked me and another human's butt in brawl a few times.

Graphics: Game looks phenomenal, and what blew my mind even more is that it runs BUTTERY smooth. I'm on the extreme preset with a GeForce 970, and holy cow, it's running so smooth, it's fantastic. Looks great and runs smooth, what more can I say?

UI: In-game the UI is functional and looks good to me, no quarrels there really. You can tell in the main menu and other menu interfaces that it's alpha because things seem placeholder and not very polished, but hey, that's an alpha, I have no doubt that they'll be changing all or most of that by release. Gets the job done for now, though.

Duel and Brawl: I only had a chance to play duel and brawl, duel I played against AI, which is really fun, great for practice. Love the duel mode, glad they included it. Brawl is great great fun as well, it seems to start out with your two players separated and sort of 1v1ing the other team of two in separate areas, but you can totally run towards the other group if you want at any time, I like that you begin spaced out like that. If you were spawned all right next to each other it'd be way too chaotic.


That's all I really had time to check out, had to go to work and all. The only other thing I wanted to bring up was emotes. I LOVE emotes just because it's a way to express emotion without words. I really think this game should incorporate more taunts, just like how they handle executions. Unlock or purchase taunts and assign them to your guy, maybe if you press Y/Triangle it'll bring up a little radial menu and you could select from many emotes, so you could point at somebody to single them out, have an emote for begging for your life, an emote for when you win/just to straight up taunt. Just three or four for a few big situations. That would add replayability even more because it'd be more stuff to unlock and purchase, more ways to customize your characters, and more ways to EXPRESS YOURSELF in battle. But I'm just happy there's an emote at all.

Huge fan of the Conqueror emote, it's so hilarious. I love killing people and then just having him throw his fists up in the air- YEAAAAAAHH. But yes, really would love to see even more, it's just great to have emotes as cherries on top of situations just to bring some lightheartedness and personality into it.

Thanks guys, keep up the battle.