Elderborn

Dark Souls meets Diablo meets Doom. Slash and hack your way through the land of the dead facing monsters through the fire and brimstone. Everything a dungeon crawler should feel like without any unduly complex extras.
Here's the thing, a game (as an adult) should be 1) Good and 2) Short. These games that claim over 50+ hours worth of content require you to sit there for over 2 days' worth of time. I can't do that anymore. I need something that knows what it's doing and does it for less than 10 hours.
Robocop is like that. This is too.

Elderborn is almost a good game. It's got most of the ingredients that would require, such as strong visuals, tight gameplay, and varied enemies. But the placement of those enemies is so terrible and ill-conceived that it basically ruins the entire game.

ELDERBORN is kinda like Dark Souls and DOOM had a little badass low-poly baby raised by an indie studio that provided metal music and monster energy drinks instead of milk. And it's simple. You charge in with a sword, hacking through enemies like you're auditioning for a Viking metal band, with the combat satisfying enough to be borderline therapeutic. The story? It’s there, but honestly, who cares when you’re too busy cleaving las esqueletos and smashing sh*t? If you’ve ever wanted to feel like the world’s angriest barbarian with a little buzz and a caffeine high, this is a game. 8.5/10 would swing axe again.

Very satisfying combat! Getting bullet time on a successful parry feels great, and so does launching foes with a heavy swing of the hammer. However, the game is very short. Only took me 5 hours to beat the campaign. Therefore, I'd recommend it if you can get it for $5-10. I wish it was much longer!

At 7 hours in I have completed the main game in hard which is the 2nd difficulty level. Overall it is a nice solid title. Runs well on my old PC using RX580 & the original Ryzen 5 cpu. Controls are slick, as is the game play. I died a lot, sometimes to falling off the map (not a glitch) but mostly due to me timing either an attack, block or parry badly. It feels fair. Combat is one of those ones where if you do block or attack at the wrong time you're left wide open and will take damage, often this is 50% of your total health in one hit. I guess if you're not used to games that punish your mistakes this one can be a bit of a steep learning curve.
There's a certain point in the game where you go from, I can tank a few hits and survive to, why are the enemies doing so much damage to me. I am ready to uninstall. But for me and it seems judging by the other reviews it's worth persevering.
I guess for me the big down side was the maps. They were confusing for me but maybe it's going for some old skool vibe where you run around like a headless chicken until you eventually end up in the right location.

Cons: Cartoony, Warcraft-like look
Monster design is meh
They say its in style of Robert Howard, but I wasn't aware he did shrooms. Its really far from Conan and Kull though.
Pros: Its cheap, especially on a sale
It goes well when you are drunk or tired and just want to relax and slash monsters
Combat is alright, very basic, but solid
Kinda nostalgic, reminds of early 2000s games in terms of both game design and model quality
Its kinda good for moments when you look at your library and think "I'm tired of all these games, what should I play."

The first chapter is a complete mis-fire. This type of game demands an open air environment. Putting it in a cave for the beginning just feels claustrophobic. The rest of the game is insanely good OMG please make more of this