Okay, so I've played Berserk Musouup through the first fight with Nosferatu Zoddo and I have some thoughts.
This is a much more traditional Musou game than I was hoping for. It takes no chances with the formula.
Mind you, I don't dislike the formula, but with a property as rich as Berserk, I feel like there is a lost of wasted potential here.
The combat is as standard as it gets for the Musou series. Guts plays like that slow big sword guy you never choose in these games unless required to by the story. I think they tried too hard to replicate the sword physics for this game. That sort of thing works in a game with a more technical and skill based combat engine, like the Souls series, but in a game that's about racking up kills and feeling like a god on the battlefield, it just doesn't translate very well to any sense of engagement. He's a slow, plodding behemoth of a character and he's just not much fun to play. Especially when the sword physics combos are such that once you start swinging, you can't quickly realign on your target area. So even if you're locked on to an enemy officer, Guts' combo trajectory takes him wildly away from them. The camera needs constant reorientation with Guts, and I feel that's a problem.
The animations and environments are all fantastic, and if you're not looking too closely it skates by at a smooth framerate. The game is good and gory, with plenty of blood to go around. But where the graphics start to get more noticeably troublesome is in the faces and in the hair. This is borderline PS2 'upscaled for HD' levesl of unpolished. Hair is not natural on the more lavishly coiffed characters, and rather than spilling down on longer haired characters like Griffith, it tends to bunch up and look like you could chisel chunks off. Also, the characters' mouths move out of sync with the dialogue and I feel this is lazy and unrefined. These minor graphic problems could be considered nitpicks, but they're noticeable and indicative of a lazy production.
The voice actor for Guts is the same guy from the 2012 trilogy and the 2016 tv series, as is everyone else. This being the case, they all did a great job of capturing the character except for Guts himself. This is not to say that his voice acting is awful, but more that he uses his 'Black Swordsman' voice for everything. That persona is a character that's been through a harrowing physical and emotional experience, and the way he talks and the things he says are reflective of that. Before that, however, he was your typical seinen hero: angry, impulsive and quick to raise his voice when frustrated. But here, he jut plays it all with tense stoicism. It's offputting. Guts is an evolving character and the reason we still love him after all these years is because we appreciate his journey and the suffering he's endured. So to see them neglect this aspect of the character -his stages of growth- is irksome.
Lastly, they use cutscenes from the 2012 anime trilogy to bridge the gap between most of the battles, and i find this jarring at times. Especially considering they re-recorded all the dialogue and, once again, frequent lip-syncing issues arise. And even worse, they have completely replaced Shiro Sagisu's brilliant and underrated soundtrack with a generic sounding fantasy OST that, while competent, is noticeably bland. So far I haven't heard a single recognizable tune and one of Berserk's most striking aspects in terms of the animated medium is its music bed. I can only hope that Susumu Hirasawa contributed a track to this, but somehow I doubt it. It's the same problem the Gundam Musou and Hokuto Musou games had in terms of the soundtrack, and it feels cheap on Koei Tecmo's part. They did the same thing with Attack on Titan, by the by. When I played Dragon Quest Heroes, they used arrangements of the series' signature OST and believe me, it only HELPED create that sense of immersion in the end. KT gets a big F here, although I will say that the sound effects of the fighting, the hacking and slashing and so forth, are perfectly fine.
Overall, I'd say that unless you're a diehard fan of Berserk who wants to see someone else's take on this legendary tale, rent, borrow or pass. If you want to purchase but are on the fence for any reason, wait for a budget release or when you have excess cash burning a hole in your pocket. More could have been done with this.
Follow up coming once I clear more of the game, but only if my opinion changes or is altered in any way.
I will stream this at some point so you can see it for yourself.