As for the animation, it turned out to be twitchy and torn in places. As in Redeemer, characters lack connectivity in movement and smoother transitions from one state to another. For example, the hero looks ahead and immediately in the next frame is already attacking someone in the opposite direction. It looks like a sharp cut in a movie and is not at all good for the game tied to martial arts. Here I want to see the smoothness of all movements and techniques. In addition, animations can be buggy, which is why characters jerk violently to the sides or pass through each other. All this greatly spoils the impression of a good game.
There are also other bugs in 9 Monkeys of Shaolin. For example, in some moments the script did not work and the character, instead of going further, fell under the textures, and the camera flew off somewhere to the side, which made it completely incomprehensible what was happening to the hero. A checkpoint restart only helped me through a few tries, when I almost quit the game thinking it was an impenetrable bug.
9 Monkeys of Shaolin looks damp – in places it really lacks polish. For example, characters can get stuck in textures, and flying objects often freeze in the air. There are also more serious flaws. When in contact with fire, the hero almost does not react to this. He does not bounce, as is usually accepted, but visually receives a kind of aura of yellow particles, which indicate that he is on fire. In the heat of battle surrounded by enemies, this can be overlooked and get huge damage in a matter of seconds. Another unpleasant “surprise” can make it difficult to obtain healing items. Sometimes, after losing and moving to the last checkpoint, breaking barrels and crates, from which medicinal teas and various other enhancements fall out, simply stop breaking. Because of this, the subsequent battle can be complicated by the lack of “healing”. Often this glitch comes along with another one that preserves the bodies of killed enemies when replaying. These bugs almost always accompany the passage of the game in online co-op mode.
By the way, in the hub you can ask one of the monks to join the assignment. At this point, a list of friends opens to invite you to your session. There was also some flaw here. When choosing the right name and clicking on it, it is completely unclear whether the invitation was sent to him or not. Accordingly, I want to press again to be sure, and the game does not interfere with this in any way. And while I thought that the function was not working and frantically pressed the button, my friend received a lot of notifications with my invitations. Perhaps it was worth making some kind of confirmation window to make it clearer.
In addition to the indicated problems, performance is degraded in cooperative mode. In places where there are a lot of opponents on the screen, the game starts to slow down, which makes it harder to react to sharp attacks, especially considering how much the mechanics of parrying are tied to timing. Even at the time of testing the cooperative mode, the invited player constantly had animation glitches, sharp teleports and regular sinking through textures.
