Soulstice Reviews

Devil may souls with Ms Guts

Honestly the game is amazing i got it on sale but i still think it's worth the 40$ the combat is good and really challenging in the later levels plus you get new weapons and mechanics you have to learn, the challenge stages are also fun but difficult, boss fights are well done and the designs for them are really cool, the story is super interesting plus the visuals have a lot of work put into them and genuinely look stunning. I don't think the game is lacking in anything really but i do think the camera angles will upset some people or annoy them, i did also think it was a bit weird at first but later got used to them and ended up just enjoying the game, if you want a fun indie hack and slash with an amazing story and S tier visuals i think you'll love this.

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

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.

As a long time fan of Claymore, Berserk and Devil May Cry, i can see the strong artistic inspirations in the game. This, is a work of art, it is the closest thing there is to a Claymore hack n slash videogame with AA or AAA production quality level. The graphics are great, the animations are dynamic, everything feels cool as fucking hell, the music is good.... but GRAPHICS-> 9/10 ART DIRECTION -> 10/10 MUSIC -> 8/10 GAMEPLAY -> 4/10 Everything about this game is just great, except the gameplay.... it starts up decent, it feels responsive, and combat goes pretty fast and you can dish up some combos here and there... but as more weapons, enemy types and mechanics are added, it gets progressively worse, here's why: - 90% of the enemies the game throws at you start having superarmor, making it annoying as hell to try to do combos, while you're literally swarmed by them. This isnt great, especially since the "affinity" mechanic pushes you to do full combos to trigger special attacks and actually end battles quickly. - Camera angles-> For the most part they're okay but the latter half of the game there are wide areas with a bunch of enemies dashing you or shooting stuff at you from off-screen. - Enemy targeting sucks, the manual targeting constantly switches enemy as they dance and dash around you, and the autotarget throws you against a different enemy than you wanted most of the time. I would literally prefer no targeting and having to aim my attacks manually than this. - Too many weapons and fucky hitboxes: There are way too many weapons and the gameplay revolves around switching to the right weapon to do more damage to different kinds of enemies. Most of the weapons in my experience sucks and it is almost always better to just use axe for everything since it hits harder, even if it doesnt have the enemy-type damage bonus. The hitbox for a lot of weapons, especially the short range ones like the knuckles, tonfas and daggers, are small, and you end up missing a good chunk of attacks, especially against big flying enemies that have superarmor and just fly away from you. Less weapon variety (4 weapons maybe) but more polished moveset would have been much, much better. - The enemies have a lot of hp endgame: Nearing the end of the game the game throws a shitload of battles at you with a lot (A LOT) of big high-rank and medium-rank enemies, making an obvious attempt at padding the length of the game, but what this accomplishes is just making the experience more tedious, and the pacing and story suffer because of this. I found myself tuning the difficulty down to the easiest one just to get it over with quickly. The fact that less than 10% of the players have actually finished the game i think is testament to how bad it really gets in the later stages. I still recommend the game and think its worth playing. I just recommend you to crank the difficulty down when you start feeling the battles drag on too much for your own sanity. I'm dead serious, dont be ashamed to do this.