Soul Shifter Reviews

Yeeeeeeeah, the game has some issues, but it's a fun experience overall. Note 3/5

this game is an awful mess, as if it were published straight from a weekend game jam. The controls are awful. You can't customize the keybindings, which is already annoying. The movement feels extremely floaty and your character will not stop moving until a second after you release the key, which is perplexing and is awful to control. It's so unreasonably difficult to move around, I thought at first it was tile-based given the delayed movement. This alone was immediately the biggest turn off for me to the game, I physically cringe at how garbage the controls are. The game requires you to use left click to attack, although the movement of the mouse has no use as it neither controls your ranged attacks nor the camera. Yeah, the camera can't be moved and is at an extremely awkward angle and distance. You basically can't see very much at all. Furthermore, if there is an object in front of your character, the camera unnecessarily moves at an even more disorienting angle, so sometimes if an object passes in front of your character, the camera will freak out. Sometimes the camera will go *inside* the object that was occluding you, and you won't be able to see anything as the game doesn't backface cull these objects. This happens all the time in forest sections making navigating them nearly impossible. The combat has no depth, you just circle-strafe and/or kite every enemy to death. You have no dodge/roll mechanics, nor any other interesting mechanics. You mash left click on everything. Your weapons will also degrade and break over time (there is no visual/audible indication of your melee weapon's status, nor any warning that it's about to break), and you can have only one ranged and one melee weapon equipped. The game will be over if you enter a room and your weapons break, as you can not leave a room without killing all enemies, and there is no way for you to damage enemies without weapons. When enemies attack you or you to them, there is not much indication, like there's no hit stun or i-frames or knockback, so it just makes the game feel even more disjointed, floaty and disconnected. There's so many bugs, for example pausing the game doesn't pause much of anything. Some enemies will still be able to move and attack, you can still die, and even the game over screen will render on top of your pause menu. It's like, instead of stopping the gameplay loop (or stopping the gameplay systems from running), there's instead just a bunch of random if statements sprinkled in the code. The 'targetting' reticle is literally just a pink sphere with wireframe, I would expect this as a debugging tool or prototype/mockup. It just looks completely out of place. Sometimes it just appears randomly on the floor. I wouldn't be so harsh on this game if it were polished and/or there were some more interesting gameplay mechanics. Or if it was made in a weekend game-jam or something. But all these issues make the game unplayable as-is.

I love dungeon crawlers and I love roguelites, so this game should have been right up my alley. Unfortunately, it manages to complicate simple game mechanics (ranged weapon use, for example) and I found myself fighting the controls the entire time I played. There are pieces of a decent game here, but not enough for me to recommend it.