If you’ve ever pulled the devil’s trigger or set your clock to witch’s time, Soulstis wants to take up arms to fight for your heart. It follows the recipe as best it can, but Soulstice is a reminder that not all character action hack and slashers are created equal. Combat is a bright spot, but it suffers from a terrible camera, buggy performance, and a steep learning curve. And while the monsters will inspire and test your reflexes and wit, the world they occupy is even more mundane and lifeless than a city blown up in the aftermath of a small apocalypse.
A tale of betrayal and intrigue within the Order of the Sacred is full of pretty predictable twists, laughter of bad guys, and overall pretty mediocre shady anti-heroes. Sisters with united body and soul, the touching relationship between Briar and Lute is the most powerful storytelling. This bizarre process creates supersoldiers called Chimeras, specifically created to fight monsters from another dimension that flow into this reality. Comparing them to other secret duos makes them stand out, as they appear to be the only body and soul duo who actually like each other. By the time you’re sent on a mission to turn all life out there into a vicious beast, you’re the only one who can complete it.
Under attack by otherworldly forces, the city of Irdan is a mundane place populated by strange monsters. A journey into an ominous storm in the heart of a fortified city takes you from sprawling shantytowns to ramparts, through damp sewers, and into the heart of the reality-distorted city itself. Still, many of these locations are boring and uninspiring, and with the exception of the last few locations in Endgame, they look pretty much the same as the others. If so, you’d have a hard time telling the difference, as they all feature the same dingy stone walls, dilapidated gates, and fiery ramparts. The resident extraordinaire monsters hit after hit of truly twisted and creative creature designs worth mentioning alongside the best of the genre, and the environmental designs seem particularly lackluster.
These freaks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, the most bizarre having glowing prisms where their heads should be, or literally giant heads, pulsating like the world’s most grotesque matryoshka dolls. Reveal the Colossus. Besides being visually expressive and cool, bosses have a wide range of attacks and patterns that are easy to identify but hard to master. Even Briar and Lute, who are always trying to avoid succumbing to corruption and turning into monsters, sometimes look super cool when they lose that battle.
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Actually navigating these stages is also a chore. This is another aspect of the old-fashioned keycard hunt. Evolves backtracking through stages and breaking smaller nodes to smash connected walls, eventually putting a time limit on how many you need to break in a row. I hated every second of repetition in these sections of — and there were a lot of them. While hiding segments, I wasn’t too interested in exploring these overwhelming locations, especially when there was the potential to destroy even more crystals.
Sprinkled throughout Soulstice’s stages are much more engaging combat encounters. If you’ve played a character action game since the original Devil May Cry, you’ll instantly know where this game takes its inspiration from. Your big sword is the bread and butter of Briar’s attacks, but as you progress, you’ll gain access to a wide range of weapons such as bows, bladed whips, or tonfas that double as my favorite gun. Weapons have a specific strength. Your fists are great for destroying armor, and your swift Katar blade overwhelms foes that need extra time to summon minions. , it feels like each of the seven weapons has a specific set of enemies, all of which are useful. By putting upgrade points into new combos and potencies, you can prioritize them over others. That way you can drill down and make it stronger.
While Briar beats, her ghostly sister Lute acts mostly passively to protect her and create openings for her attacks. Deflect projectiles, repel melee attacks, and slow and restrain attempted attackers, all with the press of a button. When things get so busy, it’s almost impossible to know how many enemies are frozen on the field or how many times they’ve blocked an attack recently. It means slipping through your defenses and you can say goodbye to your combo meter if you didn’t dodge it the old fashioned way. If you put all your trust in being able to use untested technology well enough, you will always feel bad when you inevitably fail.
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Lute is also responsible for managing your aura, which affects what you can interact with. While exploring, it can be tedious to switch colors for platforming or crystal cracking purposes. In battle, you can damage blue or red monsters respectively. Enemy groups that mix both colors, and armored, flying, or swarming creatures are some of the most difficult tests of reflexes and awareness in a game like this. Knight difficulty (3 out of 5 3rd, and the hardest I was able to get on my first playthrough), the “game over” screen popped up dozens of times. Be stylish. For the most part, this is a fun and rewarding challenge, but some fights feel unfair because missing a single cue can cause an avalanche of damage that’s hard to recover from.
When Briar and Lute got flashy moves and massive power spikes, the pressure to be perfect to get there felt counterintuitive if you were good in combat Firing on all cylinders, countering enemies, putting together combos and, importantly, not taking hits will increase your unity meter.Once the threshold is reached, some attack strings end in large finishers that deal tons of damage, giving you access to super-strong forms all Briar attack for a limited time. These are great features, but the fact that they’re behind a system that needs to be done well enough to not actually need help means you’ll never get the chance to swing through combat with these boons. It means no. If you are put on your hind legs, your favor. This kind of regression system doesn’t exist in other popular games like the old God of Wars or DmC. This allows you to build a “super” meter over time and over many battles that you can freely trigger when you are ready. Relying on building combos in one particular fight is too unreliable to incorporate into your game plan.
However, the biggest challenge in certain battles is the camera. By default it’s set to an off-center position, which tries to keep as much of the action in frame as possible, but will struggle if you hit a wall or try to move manually. , where the camera floats behind something in the foreground to block the action, or zooms in if cornered, leaving only part of the enemy in the frame to pummel. screen. That’s not the only problem – occasionally the auto-aiming moves at enemies inexplicably go off – but that’s something I’ve dealt with in almost every fight in some way.
