I'm the one around here who's into soulslikes.
So, does it mean I'll rate Deathbound highly? ....Not really.
Deathbound
I already mentioned that I'm not into soulslikes just rehashing the same old gameplay. So the mention of new mechanics in Deathbound got me interested, So you have one character who's strong in ranged attacks, and another who's strong in melee, and you can switch between them at will. That's pretty novel, right?
Actually no - it's pretty much the same as the same character switching between the sword and the bow. The actual novelty turned out to be subtler and more questionable. The characters have health bars of their own. But even this isn't groundbreaking - it was done in Darksiders: Genesis, for example. Deathbound goes further though - one character losing their health doesn't put them on cooldown temporarily or until a "bonfire" - no, it counts as a failure for all, and returns you to the last "bonfire", which is rather baffling for a soulslike. And the healing items are healing the active character
at the expense of the other characters! On top of that, the difference between the characters is that some of them have no shields. So switching to the wrong character can have bad consequences. What makes things worse is that the game encourages you to switch the 4 assigned characters at will, with boons and punishments for certain combinations - which can be fun, but also ensures that you can't rely on muscle memory for switching mid-combat. Couple that with floaty camera and floaty movement and other issues, and combat gets rather frustrating, discouraging experimentation.
Well, maybe at least the story and the world are cool? Yes and no. Yes, they're doing something unusual. No, they aren't especially good at it - with questionable voice acting, boring, drawn out "echo" scenes, like in The Division, a lack of subtlety and believability. And the environments don't look that great, with low resolution textures, mixed bag art direction, and contrived, inelegant soulslike layouts, with scaffolding and barriers. Then it ends with a rather crude boss fight.
....So, at least they tried, I guess. But I can't recommend this game to anyone.