Soulstice Reviews

This game is awesome. Play it.

Devil may souls with Ms Guts

⭐⭐ I didn't play much of this game since it had weird camera angles and felt oversaturated. I'm sure if I played more it might get better so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

combat is hard in narrow hallways. Be sure to stock up on health items and don't start on hard difficulty.

If you've read the manga Claymore, this is pretty much what that would look as a game. The game goes for a little too long, yet it ends super quickly. But other than that, everything about it is great.

While it has nice basic foundations, it goes so far up its own ass with gimmicks it just stops being fun.

I played the game through once on Human (easiest) difficulty and then played through all bosses again. I also found and tried all the challenges the game has to offer and beat all but two of them. I scraped every corner but didn't stop to smell the roses as they were all dead. The game is divided in chapters which you can go play again as you choose. Longest chapter took me about an hour to play and usually they are shorter. It's better to end the session at the chapter end than just a checkpoint or a save spot, I think. The 5 different difficulty levels have their own progression so you can't for example try a boss with harder or easier difficulty which is a bit of a bummer. Every chapter and battle is rated and timed, so you can even try to diamond them if that's your thing. I don't have enough experience in hack'n'slash to rate the gameplay that much. I thought it was good, Briar was agile enough for a superhuman and the shade mechanic with the other protagonist Lute was very clever. Characters had upgradeability and most of it was done to Lute to support your playstyle and even steer it to a certain direction. Even I got the hang of it and was very destructive by the end. That also means it's doable for everyone, I'm not the king of upgrade mechanics, hardly even a peasant. Briars upgrades were more to the weapon and combo side, they were infinitely more narrow and had maybe less impact. I had enough upgrade currency to always max the new weapons proficiency that made it work the best against foes it was meant to counter so I don't know how an unupgraded weapon would fare. There was some benefit from using different weapons against proper type enemies, armored or flying or grounded or flying enemy grounded (there were more types than this), but you could fare with the weapon of your choice if you wanted. The fights did become quite monotonous even when the game introduced new foes regularly and had variety in how the fight play out. That's probably the biggest problem, the game, I think, was too long. It could easily have been more compact as you from time to time go through areas doing the same puzzles and fighting the same foes over and over. At least the fights are scripted to place and the foes don't respawn, so when you have beaten them, they are gone. Granted, the areas are beautiful in their desolate way and very nicely done. This is a pretty game, but does need some engine.ini and startup command tweaking to perform as it should, but not too much and that is somehow to be expected from a UE4-game nowadays. This is also clearly made for consoles, so some pc-port stuff. You only have to set it up once though, so don't be scared, there are good tutorials to be found. Camera is fixed outside of battle and does introduce some platforming perspective problems but I didn't generally have problems with it. The game offers you an intro section that is resource heavy and I used it to try my settings out until I was pleased. For reference: 1440p120fps with 7500F and 9070 XT, all graphics settings maxed, no FSR. I didn't experience stuttering at all after said tweaks. I can list what I did at the end. I wanted to write this here, because the performance in game seems to be hindering people from playing this game on many occasions and that is a problem that can be solved, so you can experience... The story. It was amazingly told through characters, environment, foes and short memory sequences where you unravel the reasons why Briar and Lute are where they are. Story itself is good, but has a few holes mainly from voice-acting overlap, but keep in mind, this is not an AAA-title. Judging from credits, the development team was quite small so what they have accomplished is amazing. Voice-acting was overall good in english. The protagonist pair is voiced by the same actor and it was very pleasant to listen to, she could deliver, at least to me, the emotion needed to get invested in the story as much as it is possible for a story from medieval times with supernatural elements. I really do hope that the people who have started this game would play it to the end as you, in the time of writing, get a rare achievement from finishing the game. That's not right, I think. The story is worth plowing through. I understand the gameplay loop and performance problems can be offputting, but at least, as said, performance can be improved. Definitely try this game, it can be bought with pennies and can be well worth it. Now the tech stuff. In engine.ini I disabled shader streaming and set the game to compile shaders at load. These are commandlines that can be copypasted from the browser and can be found with an easy search. In Steam startup commands, I set -useallavailablecores -dx12 that forces the game to use all of your cpu cores as opposed to 1 or 2 the game-engine usually uses when not appropriately optimized for pc and dx12 is for possibly better performance on newer graphics cards. Then just set up your graphics settings in a way that you get the performance you want or the best possible experience.