TLDR: All in all, it was an enjoyable 80 minutes playing what I think is a pretty good introductory souls-like, with elements of MMORPGs that help provide breathing room to supplement your playtime with activities besides the consistent drumming of, albeit, deliciously satisfying combat. Duel Corp, with its art-style lends itself well to gaming at lower resolutions if needed. The combination of all that, with quest, faction, and NPC interaction/relationship systems, as well as the semi-dynamic nature provided by the world-exploration, seems to ensure that almost everyone who plays will find something they enjoy.

Duel Corp, is a 64-bit styled, Souls-like with elements of questing/crafting systems from MMORPGs like Runescape, an NPC/Faction interaction system reminiscent of Fallout, and to top it all off the world-exploration pays homage to the Mount and Blade style of games. The multiplayer seems to run fluid enough, even from the SEA region, however the NPC combat does seem to be client side and due to that, I'm not sure how the PVP and Co-op modes handle, as I have not tried them prior to this review.

I played this on my Ideapad Flex 5 at 800x600 at lowest settings, and was able to get a stable 50 fps, without my laptop overheating. For reference, my laptop overheats running chrome. I don't know how the game handles at higher performance so I leave those reviews to others, however, I do appreciate the in-game option to set the said resolution to 800x600. Thank you devs.

The brilliance in Duel Corp is in it's combat system that I think has the capacity to please both Sekiro and Darksouls identifiees, along with its ability to attact both Souls-like and MMORPG players with aspects learned from our favorite games. Narratively, the campaign that starts the game off is intriguing/mysterious and seems to include cutscenes. The visuals I've seen so far, and how they interact with the camera, in the encounter maps and boss arenas are satisfactory and dont inhibit combat that much. Whilst not to the level of environmental story telling as Darksouls, context seems to be supplemented by the addition of various filled towns and interactable NPCs where needed.

As the game is still in early access, I have run into a bug once, during the tutorial boss fight after a certain amount of repeats, he stopped fighting and continued walking into the walls and was unkillable, but a simple game restart fixed the issue.

Gameplay-wise I have not made it that far into the game, I played multiplayer mode, only seeing the tutorial zone (filled with other players), first NPC Town and a few world-exploration encounters. But up until then I have not experienced, or even know how the PVP or the Co-op aspects of the game intertwine in multiplayer mode. I do plan on finding out in my next playtime soon.

The combat is really nice, I enjoy it. You have all your usual parries, rolls, items, armour systems. But included in there is directional parry/blocking and attacking, as well as perfect parry systems. Besides that, I think there are partial hits and full hits depending on how you roll or move (maybe its intertwined with armor deflection/damage reduction). Whether or not its triggerable via rolls or what not, i'm not certain.

The quests, besides the main campaign, seem to come from town NPCs that mostly revolve around finishing game mechanic activites and enemy type eliminations around the map. You can track a maximum of 5 quests at once, and you need to be of the apropriate level to do them, however you can keep track of said quests even if you're underlevelled, which I think is a good time saving aspect. There is a crafting and gift giving system to NPCs via interacting with them, but to the extent of which, as well as purpose, I'm not sure just yet.

The world-exploration map, as I said is reminiscent, but not quite to that of Mount and Blade (MnB). Movement of NPC encounters in world-exploration, don't seem to be intertwined with the time and player like in MnB, however that could be due to the fact that I was playing on the multiplayer mode. Yet I don't recall seeing other players on said map too. So I'm really puzzled there.

Similar to MnB however, is how the encounters function. A combat in a small map for any encounter you start. Additonally, I don't think the enemies on the map chase you. From what I've played, losing just makes you restart the encounter. Furthermore, the encounter maps are quite small, where you can sometimes accidentally leave the combat area and forfeit, forcing you to have to reenter the encounter in world-exploration map (I can see how that'd be frustrating).

I plan to continue playing Duel Corp, and discovering how much more this world has to offer.

Was playing some Arma and DayZ, when my Lenovo Ideapad™ exploded and I woke up armed with guns surrounded by sword-wielding teddy bears and demons emerging from portals... Probably Staten Island.

This game is exactly as the title suggests, but you also get a small dose of bullet-hell injected into your fps-core collecting simulator. Possibly akin to risk of rain. The juxtaposition between the cute anime aesthetic and demon bosses is jarring enough that it almost convinced me an actual plot was occurring. Nevertheless, it's indeed what it seemed to be.

Review:
The praise I can give it would fall into the following;
Pretty good movement, i'm not usually a bullet-hell or quake type player, but the multi-jumps and dashes probably mimics the feeling that those games portray. Albeit, the possibility of getting stuck on trees and other obstacles, is indeed a pain but that might be an issue with me not being used to these types of games.

Game runs pretty well on my 4GB RAM Ideapad, at low settings. This hunk of metal can't run Roblox smoothly, so that itself is a pretty big win for the devs. I assume this is due to the simple textures and maybe how the wave spawning works? About that, once you figure out how the spawning works, you can cheese the demo pretty easily. But again, its a demo, things aren't supposed to be that complicated.