![]() ![]() These are great features, but the fact that they’re stuck behind a system that requires you to already be doing well enough that you don’t really need help means you’ll never get an opportunity to use these boons to swing a battle in your favor if you're put on the back foot. When you hit the threshold, some attack strings end with big finishers that do a ton of damage and you can access a form that super powers all of Briar’s attacks for a limited time. When firing on all cylinders, countering enemies, pulling together combos and, importantly, not getting hit, a Unity meter rises. When Briar and Lute get access to some flashy moves and a huge power spike if you can excel in combat, but the pressure to be perfect in order to get there felt counterintuitive. Putting upgrade points into new combos and potency lets you favor one over the others, and if you do you can really drill down and make it powerful. ![]() There is some overlap, but for the most part each of the seven weapons felt like it had a specific set of enemies it was tailor-made for, and all are useful. Each weapon has a particular strength your fist is great for busting armor, and your speedy katar blades overwhelm enemies that need extra time to summon minions. Your big sword is the bread and butter of Briar’s attacks, though as you progress you’ll gain access to a wide array of weapons like a bow, a bladed whip, or my favorite, tonfas that double as guns. If you’ve played any character-action game since the original Devil May Cry, you’ll immediately see where this one draws its inspiration from. Sprinkled throughout Soulstice’s stages are the far more compelling combat encounters. And while these linear stages hide collectibles, upgrade points in small detours and unchallenging platforming segments off the beaten path, I wasn’t very motivated to explore these largely underwhelming locations, especially if breaking even more crystals could potentially be involved. I hated every single repetitive second of these sections between fights – and there were a lot of them. It evolves to sending you to backtrack through stages to break smaller nodes in order for their connected walls to shatter, and eventually puts time limits on how many you need to break in succession. Most involve some form of breaking color-coded crystals to progress, which is just another face on the old-school keycard hunt. Even Briar and Lute, who constantly are attempting to avoid succumbing to corruption and transforming into monsters themselves, look super cool when they occasionally lose that battle.Īctually navigating through these stages is a chore as well. Bosses have a wide range of attacks and patterns that can be easy to identify but hard to master, on top of being visually expressive and cool. These freaks take all manner of shape and size, with the most eccentric having glowing prisms where their heads should be, or literally being a giant head that opens up to reveal a pulsating colossus within like the world’s most grotesque Matryoshka doll. Contrast that with the exceptional monsters populating the place, which are hit after hit of truly twisted and creative creature design worthy of being mentioned alongside the genre’s finest, and the environmental design seems especially lackluster. If I saw screenshots from each of those missions, I’d have a hard time telling the difference between them as they all feature the same dingy stone walls, dilapidated gates, and firey ramparts. Yet the many of these locations are dull and unappealing, and with the exception the last few locations in the end game, barely look any different than one another. ![]() Your journey to the ominous storm in the center of the fortified city takes you from the sprawling slums, into the castle walls, through the dank sewers, and into the reality-bent heart of the city itself. The city of Illdan, under attack by otherworldly forces, is a bland place populated with eccentric monsters. ![]()
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