Developer: Reply Game Studios
Publisher: Modus Games, Maximum Games
Platform: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PS5
Soulstice – Review
Hack and slash games have always been quite popular. These games often have a fairly simple story but end up having very engaging gameplay. It’s extremely satisfying to take on an army of monsters with only one character and eventually still make it out alive. When we first saw Soulstice we thought it would provide us with a similar experience, and for the most part, we were right. We were treated to a fairly interesting action RPG with fast-paced combat, but we felt the game missed certain elements to make it stand out from the crowd of similar titles.
Story
Soulstice’s story is very simple. You, Briar, and her spirit sister, Lute, are sent to a neighboring town to investigate a disturbance in the force. Upon arrival, you discover that the entire town has been slaughtered by evil Wraiths, and it is your job as a Chimera to vanquish everything that is evil. Of course, the plot does thicken along the way, as it seems the order you work for may have a few skeletons in their closet.
The story is quite appealing, but it’s also very shallow. You could easily gloss over a few of the game’s dialogues and still comprehend everything that is going on. The characters are very one-dimensional and the overall setting feels a bit cliché. The game’s plot is just there to create an incentive to press on, but the game would have probably had the same appeal even with only half of the current dialogues.
Graphics
Graphically Soulstice is not a bad-looking game. The environments are very nicely crafted, even though you’ll go through seemingly similar sections all the time. Nonetheless, the backdrops look quite cool. The characters and enemies, however, all look a bit out of place. This is because the backdrops are very realistic and the characters and monsters all look a bit cartoony. We felt like the character models looked a bit dated and this was further enhanced by some very wonky animations during some of the game’s cutscenes. Soulstice also doesn’t shy away from adding a bit of gore to the combat sequences, and this gives it a more mature look.
Sound
The sound design is not too bad. The soundtrack has a very cinematic quality to it, and the sound effects give decent feedback for the onscreen actions. Hacking and slashing your way through monsters sounds satisfying. Sadly, the voice acting is of mixed quality, and the main characters, such as Briar and Lute, sound as if they lack any emotions. This drags the dialogues down, and you’ll eventually zone out during certain dialogues due to very poor acting.
Gameplay
Soulstice is a fairly standard action RPG with hack-and-slash-like combat mechanics. The game will have you play through reasonably short levels in which you’ll have to fight enemies and go through several platforming segments. The game is fairly straightforward, but it does take some time to master the intricacies of the game’s combat. If you’re playing on a lower difficulty, you can power through fairly easily, but on higher difficulties, you’ll have to make sure you counter enemy attacks in order to survive. The game uses a fixed camera angle for most of its gameplay, and while this is charming at times, it also turns into something very annoying for some segments of the game. More than once we couldn’t get a proper overview of our surroundings, and it was also extremely hard to land certain jumps during the platforming sections.
As a whole, the controls are decent. We found the combat to be intuitive, and we soon found ourselves cutting our way through several enemies. The game gets more difficult when you start using Lute’s Banishing and Evocation fields, which allow you to hit other types of enemies. While the overall concept of this system is interesting, we felt the execution of the system was a bit flawed. During a lot of combat segments, you cannot properly move around the camera, making it extremely hard to target certain enemies. At times we even had these enemies just fly out of range, while we were also forced to use one of Lute’s field skills. After a while, these battles became quite tedious.
The further you progress, the stronger you’ll eventually become. Briar and Lute both have their own skill trees that allow them to become more powerful. You can opt to invest in different sub-trees for each character, and thus you can cater to your own playstyle. Briar’s weapons can also be upgraded, unlocking more combos or just increasing the power of said weapons. It was quite satisfying to gradually become stronger and stronger. Progress is quite slow, however, and you’ll truly benefit from always destroying all objects in your surroundings to gather more essence for your skills.
Our biggest issue with the game is the fact that it doesn’t do anything groundbreaking or even new for that matter. Soulstice borrows a lot of mechanics from other popular games and tries to cram in as many of these items as possible to create something original in the process. While this may sound good on paper, it eventually just feels like an unpolished and unfinished game.
Conclusion
While we fairly enjoyed hacking and slashing our way through what Soulstice had to offer, we couldn’t help but shake that ‘jack of all trades, master of none” feeling. The game tries to incorporate many elements of other bigger titles in its package and because of this we ended up constantly comparing Soulstice to these other titles. That being said, if you can overlook the extremely shoddy camera and grindy gameplay formula, then you’ll certainly have quite a bit of fun with this one.
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