Soulstice from Reply Games Studio was released for the PC this past week and a few things were added, but not a lot of gameplay design changed since our preview last month. That isn’t a bad thing, as it shouldn’t be expected to have changed in a small timeline. Related, my opinion of the game hasn’t shifted too far from my second preview. The game is gorgeous, it has a strong set of characters and a compelling story that reaches the same heights as a Devil May Cry, though not thick on lore. The backend design is amazing, especially the leveling, but the shortcomings still exist. Sure, I could explain all of this in this review’s first paragraph, but that wouldn’t be proper. Having said that, let’s dig right into Soulstice.
Story
Soulstice revolves around two sisters, Briar and Lute, who are reborn as a chimera, a dual-brand warrior. Lute is a soul that is bound to her sister and helps protect her, as well as take care of supernatural issues that may come up on their journey. Briar is the chimera brute that does all the sword-swinging and taking care of business. Briar’s journey is to meet up with other knights of her type and rid the world of evil before evil overtakes her.
I still stand with my preview comment that this world is creepy, and it has a Devil May Cry vibe to it. For this go around, I also picked up on a God of War type of storyline where anger leads to destruction (not the 2018 GoW, but rather the ones prior where there is a lot of yelling). The death and destruction featured in the story also was a sprinkle of Dark Souls. Everything is bleak and destroyed, and there is little hope of recovery or salvation. Who doesn’t like that type of atmosphere in their story? Huh?
While it doesn’t have the humor that carries Devil May Cry’s horror, it brings a delicious sense of dark ambiance to the world that Soulstice lives within. You get two characters that are suffering together. One is dead, and the other is suffering from being a chimera, and hoping not to cross over to something more powerful and worse. The sense of temporary for both characters and fragility hangs on every word and move the duo makes. The devs didn’t want you to feel comfortable at all throughout the game and they accomplished this through bleak visuals and methodical narrative design. All of it works for Soulstice and will be the reason you immediately get hooked on it. And you want that type of hook if you’re a developer. Grab the player with the story, and work out the gameplay later, which was the actual plan from the get-go according to the devs.
Reply Game Studios put together the action and then created a story around it. It’s how good stories are made sometimes. Hell, it was how Black Dynamite was created, where Michael Jai White mocked up a picture of himself in costume and two scantily clad ladies around him, then sent it to director Scott Sanders and said that he didn’t know the story, but he wanted to create one around that picture. It seemed to work out okay for them. Soulstice was the same way, where the devs just built the action and figured out how to match the story. It worked out for the most part, as you get a very dark and sinister world in the story that is backed up by visuals and action.
Speaking of visuals…
The visuals
This is a gorgeous game from beginning to end. It pleasantly reeks of death and destruction around every corner, and lots of ray-tracing that is well-placed. Visually, there is a lot to love about Soulstice, as they match up perfectly with the story. You’ll start the game in the lower part of a broken kingdom, where the villages are on fire and destroyed, and the atmosphere is simply death. As you progress up, in a Ghost ’n Goblins type of fashion, everything gets worse and worse…but pleasantly. The amount of destruction and the girth of the kingdom itself really puts the story in perspective and sells you the mission. There seemed to be a lot of time and effort put into building this desolate and destroyed world for the story and it worked out. Anytime you can reinforce your narrative with visuals, and make the visuals lively and chaotic, which matches the story beautifully, then you’re in a great place. You have done your visual due diligence and are ready to start perfecting the gameplay.
On another note, and something I really noticed the first time around with Soulstice, the acting is superb. Stefanie Joosten’s portrayal of both Briar and Lute is amazing. She kills it. She delivers the story and does a perfect job in doing so. I thoroughly enjoyed the acting and cutscenes. They added to the gameplay in a positive manner.
Let’s talk shift to the gameplay.
Ups and downs
As described in the preview, I enjoyed the gameplay, for the most part, especially the backend design. The leveling and skills tree is extensive as it is appropriate. The game is action-oriented with a hint of exploration, though limited due to the camera (going into that in a minute), so you are constantly hacking and slashing your way through boxes and enemies. Destroying both boxes and enemies provide you with tiny little red crystals that add up and allow you to open new skills for Briar. These skills can be purchased through a shopkeeper that randomly appears in certain places during each level. For the number of categories and sub-categories within each, there are a lot of skills you can acquire. Some are offensive, some are defensive, and some are just simply different weapons. The number of different skills will motivate you to keep bashing heads and boxes to get more red crystals. It’s a good way to get you to explore and find nooks and crannies that might have goodies in them.
There is also a grading system that provides you with more goodies to help open those skills. After each fight, you’ll receive a grade (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond) and a reward for how you did. The more combos you get and the fewer hits you take equals more crystals. Using your current skills to gain access to more skills will motivate you to not only learn the controls but also get better at avoiding enemy attacks. You have probably seen this a lot in other action games, and it is well-placed and implemented in Soulstice. There are intense situations during the action where you’ll have to really bust your hump to gain better scores that equal out to better rewards. It’s all motivation for you to understand and control the game better, and it works.
Anyway, on the Lute side of the tracks, there are white/blue crystals to collect, which also play towards building up an extensive, though different skills tree. She is mainly your secondary defense and offense, but how she works is more powerful in my opinion, especially during a chaotic battle. She is good with temporarily freezing people, knocking people out of powerful moves, and just keeping Briar safe in general. She has a finite amount of time to help before her power needs to be recharged, but for the most part, her skills are important for completing the game. Both characters’ skill sets are powerful and balanced. I loved this part of the game and felt like the devs nailed that balance between both. That can be a tricky situation sometimes, where two heroes are trying to figure out their purpose in the overall gameplay design, but both Briar and Lute are equally vital for gameplay success and enjoyment.
The main crux of the gameplay in Soulstice is of a hack and slash variety. This is where the Devil May Cry and God of War comparison falls into the mix. You jump around, you slash and kick monsters’ butts while juggling the strengths of Briar and Lute in the process. Briar will do the sword-swinging and bashing, while Lute will do the protecting and revealing of phantoms so that Briar can eliminate them. There is a lot to process during the action, especially if you’ve got more than six enemies coming at you with different skills. For example, there is a time early on when you might have giant armored golem creatures come at Briar and she must knock off their armor and then dispose of them. In addition to them in the same fight, you also have ranged weapon-wielding spear throwers that are staying out of the battle but have you in their sights. On top of that, you might have aggressive sword-wielding grunts that are running at you – all at the same time. Briar does most of the hitting, while Lute can freeze some of the monsters to give Briar time to slowly take down the overall number of enemies. It’s a balance and it’s a tricky one at that sometimes. You will occasionally get ‘B’ prompts (if you’re using a controller) that allow you to basically send Lute a quick message to delay an enemy’s attack. She will oblige if you hit the ‘B’ button in time. If you miss the opening, more than likely Briar is going to get hit. You can dodge using the ‘LB’ button, but there is so much going on that sometimes you just forget. It’s a beautiful chaos that can be managed once you learn how to properly use the characters you control.
What isn’t beautiful chaos? The camera. I have complained about the locked camera for two previews. I was cautiously optimistic that the locked camera would be eliminated when the final release of this game came out. When I loaded up the game for the first time, I was excited to learn that the first stage (in a dream world) featured a fully controllable camera. I thought to myself, “Oh, Nathan, your opinion made a difference for once! Someone listened!” (Out of 20 years). I enjoyed swinging the camera around and keeping an eye on all the enemies as if I was back playing Ghost of Tsushima again. Then the game loaded up the first stage at the kingdom and…locked camera. As I pointed out in my preview last month, if the camera is locked for game-functioning reasons, I can understand it. If it isn’t, well, that camera needs to be unlocked. The locked camera limits your view and goes beyond making you uncomfortable during heavy amounts of action. Beating up on an enemy while I can’t see what is going on behind me is not very fun. I want to know when an enemy is running up on me or is near me, especially the ones that spit poison or explode. Limiting my view makes this game irritating. The half-hearted solution to avoiding the locked view is to lock onto another enemy, but that requires seeing an enemy most of the time. Again, if it’s a gameplay functioning decision, where you can’t show everything at once because it would make the gameplay unstable, I get it. Horizon Zero Dawn limits the amount of gameplay the player can see because it can’t load it all at once, but those devs found a way to allow for an unlocked camera while limiting the resources asked from the PC. While Guerrilla Games might have 500+ devs and a 100m+ budget to work with, this is probably not the case for Reply Game Studios. Whatever the case might be, this is the most unpleasant part of the gameplay experience for me. I don’t like it, it is a late 90s/early 2000s design, I wish it was corrected, and I’m still hopeful it will be in the future. A gamer can dream, right?
Beyond the camera, the rest of Soulstice is fun. The game features some gnarly bosses that are creatively put together, an unrivaled atmosphere that is insidious as it is gorgeous, and a variety of lower-level enemies that make the chaos fun to control. There’s a lot to love about this game and it’s big to boot.
Let’s wrap this sucker up.
Conclusion
Soulstice from Reply Game Studios brings a strong story, a good amount of action, and paints a perfectly drab world to tie it all together. The backend gameplay design helps to add more value to the experience while motivating the player to keep exploring and pushing forward. The only caveat to the experience is the locked camera that will frustrate and hinder the gameplay at times. Overall, it’s a fun game, but it could use a fully controllable camera to make it even better.
