After 100+ hours, I earned my first Platinum Trophy on NIOH. So, obviously, I loved the game. Hopefully, you'll enjoy it as much as I did.The MapYou select Missions from a Map. There are Main Missions, which drive the story, and Sub Missions which use existing levels populated with different enemies to create additional content. Feel free to fight through them to advance the story or farm them for additional loot.MissionsThe game plays like a Souls game. Battle your way to the next checkpoint, which is a Kodama Spirit Shrine. If you die, and you will, you'll respawn at the last Shrine you visited. All of the enemies will respawn as well. Your XP is called Amrita. When you die, you drop it. You have a Guardian Spirit in the game that gives you special stat bonuses. On your first death, your spirit will stay with your Amrita to guard it. So, you must battle your way back to your Amrita to reclaim it without your Spirit Bonuses. This is a challenge. If you die again, you lose your Amrita, but recover your Spirit. A special item will allow you to recover your Amrita, but they are few and far between. Or, you can abandon your Amrita and call back your Spirit at a Shrine. So, there is always tension when you are battling your way through the Missions.LootThe loot system is amazing and rewarding if you want to spend time at the blacksmith looking at inventory screens. You can have weapons, armor, and two charms. Each of these gives you stat bonuses. When you visit a blacksmith you can customize your weapons and armor. You can change the look, re-roll the stats, swap specific stats from one item to another, or level up an old piece of gear to increase it's stat boosts. This is pretty awesome and NIOH is very generous with Loot. It's much easier to customize your character in NIOH, than in the Souls games because you have more stat bonus slots. In a Souls game, you may have to level up 5 times to use a cool sword, but in NIOH, you can equip a new piece of armor or a new charm or a new spirit to boost your stats to use that sword.CombatIt's much faster than Souls and maybe even a bit faster than Bloodborne. The enemies seem to hit harder and chase you farther, than in the Dark Souls and Bloodborne games. The combat is incredibly fast and you can get hit by multiple enemies at the same time resulting in an instant death. The larger enemies that have 3 hit combos that can kill you on the second hit. The combat is very fast and precise. As you advance through the game you'll unlock new moves to extend combos and a variety of parry attacks.To block, hold L1. To parry, hold L1 and press one of your attack buttons. You can choose which parry you want to execute. This gives you more freedom than the Souls games because you can choose how you parry the attack. Do you want to perform a wide arcing attack or a powerful counter with your parry? You can decide.WeaponsThere are 5 weapon types. Sword, Spear, Dual Swords, Chain Sickle, and BIG AXE. Each of these weapons has 3 stances. Low, which is good for quick attacks. Medium, which is good for counters and multiple opponents. High which is good to deal a large amount of damage to a single enemy. So, the learning curve for combat is steeper than the Souls games. You carry two Melee weapons and two Missile weapons with you at all times. You can swap between the weapons and the stances quickly during combat.KiKi functions like Stamina. Using a weapon, blocking, or evading consumes Ki. Your Ki refreshes quickly. If you run out of Ki, this is VERY BAD! You cannot move, attack, evade, or block for over a second. If you are hit in this state, you take extra damage. Basically, if you run out of Ki in a boss fight and you get hit, you're dead. You really want to avoid running out of Ki!!! To make matters worse, Demonic Enemies pollute the Earthly Realm with Yokai energy, which slows your Ki recovery.As your Ki replenishes, a timed button press will boost the recovery speed and clear any demonic energy around you with a Ki Pulse. You'll need to pull off Ki Pulses in combat when you battle the tougher enemies.StoryThe Story follows William, who ventures to Japan and becomes the first western samurai. A maniac named Kelley wants to start a war in Japan so he can mine Amrita. Amrita will turn a human, animal, or guardian spirit into a superhuman monster. There is no shortage of enemies in NIOH. You'll fight humans, undead, demons, giant monsters, a variety of bosses, and all of the fights are engaging.MultiplayerThere is Co-op in the game and PVP was added recently.RatingThe game is M for Mature, but there's no nudity or sex, just demon slaying violence.ValueThe main game can take you about 40 hours to complete if you rush through. If you want to finish every Mission, this could take 100 hours. Then there's a New Game + Mode called Way of the Strong, where you can replay any mission in the default or Way of the Strong Mode. Way of the Strong, populates the levels with higher level enemies.Once you get the hang of the combat system, it's really difficult to put down. NIOH is incredibly rewarding on so many levels.Definitely play this if you want a challenge, love Ninja and Samurai, or are hungry for a Bloodborne Style game.