Let us be clear before the numbers arrive: the moment-to-moment fighting in this game is exceptional. The weapons have distinct weight, the enemy telegraphs are honest, the arenas are built so that positioning matters more than reflex, and the difficulty is calibrated to make you improve rather than memorise.
You die a great deal. That is intended, and it would be fine.
Anatomy of nineteen seconds
We broke the cycle down because the total was so consistent that it had to be composed of fixed parts rather than variable loading. It is: two seconds of death animation, three seconds of fade to black, six seconds of an unskippable results panel showing figures you already know, five seconds of level reload, and three seconds of a camera flythrough of the arena entrance.
Only five of those nineteen seconds are the game reading from a drive. The other fourteen are decisions.
| Segment | Duration | Skippable |
|---|---|---|
| Death animation | 2.0s | No |
| Fade to black | 3.0s | No |
| Results panel | 6.0s | No |
| Level reload | 5.0s | Not applicable |
| Entrance flythrough | 3.0s | No |
What it does to play
It makes you cautious in a game built for aggression. By hour four we had stopped attempting the risky opening that the arena design plainly rewards, not because it was wrong but because being wrong cost nineteen seconds and being right cost nothing.
That is a difficulty change the designers did not author. The combat wants you to throw yourself at a problem repeatedly and learn its shape; the respawn wants you to hedge. When those two pull in opposite directions the one holding the stopwatch wins.
You cannot design a game that rewards experimentation and then price each experiment at nineteen seconds. The loop teaches caution far more reliably than the arena teaches courage.
The session arithmetic
Across our recorded play, the median successful run lasted about ninety seconds and the median attempt count per new arena was seven. That is roughly one hundred and thirty seconds of fighting for every one hundred and fourteen seconds of waiting on a fresh arena, and it holds across the campaign.
Aggregated over the two-hour sessions we logged, twenty-seven per cent of the clock was the respawn cycle. Not the menus, not the boot, not the difficulty of the game — the fade, the panel and the flythrough.
The fighting itself
Which is why this is a 6.4 and not a 4. Strip the cycle to four seconds and the same game is an 8.5, and nothing else about it would need to change. The arenas are excellent, there are seventeen of them, and by the end we were reading enemy compositions at a glance in a way very few games in this genre teach.
The options menu also deserves credit: full remapping, three text sizes, an option to reduce screen shake, and a toggle for the camera shake during executions. Somebody here cared about the player in every part of the game except the one that costs them time.
Where this leaves it
Fourteen of the nineteen seconds are choices rather than technical necessity, which is what makes this worth writing at length. A game that shows this much care in its combat and its accessibility options has simply never had somebody sit with a stopwatch during the part between attempts, and the effect on how the game is actually played is larger than any patch note would suggest.