Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Wider than Hades and more demanding with it: two escape routes, a resource economy on the surface, and bosses that punish the sprint-attack habit the first game rewarded.

Two games glued together, and the management half is where a run is actually lost — a starving flock undoes a perfectly good dungeon.

Machines have components you are meant to shoot off with the right element. A player who ignores that fights the same Thunderjaw for ten minutes with the wrong arrows.

Swinging is forgiving by design. The spikes are the crowded arena fights on Ultimate, where one unblocked rifle burst is most of a health bar.

Real-time pressure with an ATB gauge underneath it. Bosses are staggered checklists, and the materia loadout decides whether a fight is a wall or a formality.

Combat that yields immediately to a difficulty slider, wrapped around a preparation system the game quietly assumes you will ignore.

Level gating does the work encounter design would: a mercenary four levels above you is unkillable, and the game’s answer is more hours rather than a better plan.

The build carries the game. A netrunner or a sandevistan trivialises fights that a scattered stat spread makes unwinnable, and the difficulty setting only changes the numbers underneath that.

Give Me God of War removes the stagger the whole combat loop leans on, and turns the optional Valkyries into the fights people put the controller down over.

The shield parry replaces Eternal’s resource juggling, so the demand moves from managing three meters to reading incoming attacks. The difficulty sliders are unusually granular about which of those you want.