Jun 23

Jun 23 Review | Souldiers - Meek And Metroid

Souldiers is a Metroidvania with tough combat, huge beautiful areas to explore, and some cool boss fights. It’s a game that should, in theory, be exactly my kind of thing, but the experience has me feeling far more mixed than I’d like. There are just a few too many little issues, and they build into a creeping sense of dissatisfaction as you play. I don’t dislike the game, but I’m also not enamoured with it.

It kicks off an old-school fantasy war between one place and another place (it all quickly becomes irrelevant) and it turns out that the place your unit is holed up in is a death trap. A Valkyrie appears to whisk you all away, and voila, you’re in a big old fantasy realm filled with strange creatures, evil heroes, and lots of spike traps.

Please die, please die, please just die.

You’ve got three classes to choose from, but being something of a magician myself (I’m not), I went for the magic class. My basic staff attack summoned short-range projectiles, my heavy attack summoned a small blast of magic, and I had a dodge. Along with that, a special talisman allowed me to create a shield, which is nice. It’s fairly standard stuff, but becomes more enticing when you level up for the first time and gain the ability to leave behind explosive afterimages.

Unfortunately, while you do unlock cool abilities as you move further through the game, your later level-ups feel a bit more muted. You can only unlock your next skill after a further three level-ups, and they take a long time to manage. Each enemy in the early game nets you between 1 and 10 experience, and it takes 100, then 150, and so on to level up. It very quickly becomes painfully slow to progress and build your character, and then the new skills you get from levelling up just feel a little less exciting. It’s not the end of the world, but it makes you feel like you are not improving your character in any meaningful way.

It’s not helped by the enemies you’re fighting either. While each enemy has moves that are easy enough to learn, even the most basic enemy feels way spongier than it should. Simple enemies in Metroidvanias should take one to three hits to take down because combat isn’t the point - it is scattered throughout exploration to keep you on your toes. Despite combat still being only one singular part of the equation in Souldiers, it feels forced to the front due to how tanky the enemies you fight are. It could be understandable in the early game, to make the player feel frailer in the early goings, but tanky enemies only become more prevalent as you progress through the story. Again, maybe this wouldn’t be as big an issue without the other little cuts, but it all adds up.

There are other little things that niggle away at you too. Areas feel a bit too large, bosses almost feel haphazardly placed in the world, and it feels as though your character is always struggling to keep up. I still like Souldiers overall, but it ends up feeling a little too stretched, and playing it for a long period of time can leave you feeling as though you’ve not really done anything. At first glance, there’s a lot of potential in Souldiers, but it feel goes amiss in its execution.