AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Soulstice bay area3/28/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Getting around the fortress city involves double jumping about and using Lute’s field abilities (more on them in a moment) to create platforms to reach new areas. It’s as much a platformer as it is a brawler. One locale blends into the next into the next – eventually it will feel like one homogenous blob of a fortress. As you explore and progress, the interiors give way to exteriors, the darkness gives way to the blizzard-covered centre of the city where the tear is they are trying to reach, but on the whole, most of Soulstice looks the same. Their purposes are undefined, it’s just a massive fortress city mostly infested with debris and red crystals. There’s next to no foliage, or variation as you go from one dingy room to another. Wooden docks give way to a massive hulking stone fortress, and that’ll be your home for a chunky portion of the game. Turn your brightness up because in many parts you’ll barely be able to see what’s going on. Soulstice is an exceptionally dark and dingy game. To break the mood sometimes would have been great – revealing some sister bickering or banter, and convincing me they even knew each other. Briar and Lute are just kind of there, written without humour or even convincingly as sisters. Even Briar fighting with a kind of corruption inside her is really not portrayed in any interesting way, far more useful for combat than backstory. ![]() It’s a shame because Briar and Lute look interesting and their backstory and links with the main story could have been fascinating. Flat tableau-based memory sequences with voiceover – not exactly inspiring when you’ve worked so hard for the answers.ĭon’t come to Soulstice for the story. Soulstice uses the worn-out mechanic of memory sequences to fill in the blanks I really wanted in the main story. The answers come eventually, but to be honest, they were very predictable and not very interesting when they did. They’ve been sent in to seal this tear in the sky, and sometimes they can ask lore-type questions of their handler Layton, a kind of sardonic shop-cum-priest figure, whose explanations rarely do more than raise more questions. However some 4-5 hours in, 5 chapters or so, I had still only barely entered the city, and I still knew next to nothing about who these two are or were. I thought fine, I don’t need all the answers upfront. Who are they? Why are they here? How did Lute die and get attached to her sister? You’ll have to keep going in the dark for a while to get the answers. But at least to start with you’ll get nothing about Briar and Lute themselves. Only dual warrior Chimera can stand against it. There’s a tear in the sky and Chaos streaming out that’s turning the whole of Ilden city’s population into ravenous wraiths who devour any survivors. Soulstice really throws you into the thick of the story, where explanations are a luxury drip-fed to you over the course of a fifteen to twenty-hour playthrough. Would you look at that? A tear in reality has happened. Chimera are a breed of ancient and sacred warriors who can face the Chaos that pours out should a tear in reality happen. Briar is an Ashen Knight, your brash melee character, but also, thanks to the Shade (or ghost) of her dead sister bonded to her, a Chimera. You play as Briar, but also as her sister Lute, both voiced by Stefanie Joosten, who played Quiet in Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain. We need fast-paced, visceral, combo-heavy slashers too. But it was refreshing to see not every third-person action title is going in that direction. ![]() The ‘Soul’ in Soulstice led me and possibly others to think this would be a high difficulty, slow combat, on a knife edge of being killed, souls-like experience. Yep, there’s a lot of Devil May Cry in here. A single-player third-person combat scenario, a world-threatening force of demons, combat encounters that are concerned more with scoring combos you perform and the flow you achieve, challenge rooms, and even red orbs to collect to purchase and level skills. But is it a wonderful homage or a poor imitation? The Finger Guns Review:ĭark and stylish new melee brawler Soulstice wears its influences firmly on lead character Briar’s armoured sleeve – leave the guns at the door and this is Devil May Cry from an alternate timeline. High-octane brawler Soulstice takes a lot of notes from Devil May Cry. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |