I am disappointed. I really wanted to like this game, and technically there’s a lot to like about Souldiers, but it has a lot of small issues that mount up to me… not liking it.

I’m a whole 27 hours into this game (maybe a bit less, I did keep it open a few times while eating), and I’m actually probably almost done with it, but no. I’m just tired of it.

So I will not review it, but I will talk about it. I can’t review it, because I’m not done with it, thus I can’t have a fully-formed opinion of it. But I can at least explain why I’m done with it.

So let’s go and talk about it a bit in this non-review! This will be pretty scattered, since it’s not a review, and I won’t quite go through the same kind of points I would in a review.

Developer: Retro Forge
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Release date: June 2, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Metroidvania

Not-Review

The story is not particularly interesting, which is fine by me. You play as a nameless, personality-less, boring soldier. You have a class choice, and that’s it. Each class has different combat abilities. The game starts with you being part of an army in a war, but you get stuck in a cave. A valkyrie appears, says you’re all about to die, so she brings everyone to the afterlife. The rest of this is about trying to find a way out of whatever the world of the afterlife is called, helping people there along the way, and trying to stop the end of the world or whatever. It’s fine.

When you select your character, it would be nice to be able to try out the classes for a second, just to see what their capabilities are, or see a demonstration. I just went with the sword guy because that’s obvious, but mages and archers can work differently for these types of games and it would be nice to know without having to go through unskippable cutscenes to get to try them. The mage does sound interesting, though I hear it has pretty crappy damage output.

Speaking of, the cutscenes are unskippable, even once you’ve seen them and have to see them again. It’s 2022, there isn’t a dev that should still be making unskippable cutscenes.

Actually I’ll talk about PC performance. It’s a weird one. Generally it runs well and doesn’t have the loading issues the console versions apparently have. But it has a weird, I believe intentional design element in how the game runs on PC. Namely, the devs SEEM to have decided that the game, regardless of settings, runs at exactly 81fps. All the time. No more, no less, the game is meant to go at 81. I don’t know why, but that’s just what happens. There’s occasional hitches, like when there’s a checkpoint activating, but for the most part, smooth, stable, 81fps. I’ve never seen that, but hey, you do you Retro Forge.

Difficulty is pretty high. Enemies hit you real fucking hard, leveling up hardly makes you stronger so grinding isn’t really a strategy (those 2 extra HP per level are very useless considering all enemies hit you for way more than that). That said, I do think most of the bosses are pretty fun to fight, with a few that are complete bullshit. One of the big issues to me is how long it takes between dodges. When you press the dodge button, you have to wait until you flash until you can dodge again, which is a bit over 2 seconds I think. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but enemies in this game are pretty relentless. If you’re playing the shield dude, you can still block most attacks, so that’s good. I have no idea if the other classes can also block, maybe they can, I sure hope so because the bosses here are pretty relentless.

Some enemy designs are very shit, specifically flying enemies. The problem with flying enemies, except for one that dives down to attack you, is that they’re all programmed to fly up if you move up. That’s tremendously annoying and kinda hard to deal with, at least with sword dude, because there’s no good vertical attack options, except an axe subweapon that has very limited uses (and has fairly limited vertical range). There’s a few enemies that are particularly annoying (the forcefield bird warrior guy, for example), but none quite as much as any of the flying enemies.

On a separate note from the enemy designs, the bosses are pretty cool for the most part. A few of them are a bit BS, or have attacks that either aren’t well telegraphed or just have some weirdness to dealing with them… but, generally, they’re fun. They’ll kill the shit out of you until you figure out their patterns, but these are fun.

Status effects last way too fucking long, especially paralysis which certainly lasts around a minute (during which you’ll periodically get stunned). Yeah you have items to cure them, but you only have a small amount of them (especially early into the game).

Speaking of subweapons… they’re all pretty much useless. And there’s so fucking many of them. I skipped one after a particularly bad death that sent me back like 20 minutes, because I didn’t want to waste time grabbing it, and I still have over 20 (I think there’s 26 total in the game). You can switch subweapons on-the-fly, but having to scroll through like 20 is so dumb (you CAN pause and scroll through very shitty menus to select them instead of on-the-fly scrolling, but that’s just as bad). They also all use the same ammo, though a different amount of the ammo. So while the dagger may have a max of ~30 uses, the axe has ~5. If you use an axe, that takes away 6 of those dagger uses… but this doesn’t really matter because the subweapons are all awful, and only used when there’s things that require them, like switches for pig bombs or breakable walls to bomb.

This game has a lot of time-wasting. There’s these drones you have to hit with lightning to start them up, then you have to follow them until they get to their destination while also staying close enough to them. It’s not gameplay, it’s just annoying, except one segment where the following aspect was also a bit of platforming puzzle solving. There’s one segment where you have to get a fruit at the top of one area and just bring it to town, but using the fast-travel isn’t allowed. But there’s nothing in your way because you can one-shot all the enemies, so it’s just a time trial… that is pretty loose, so you can take a bit of extra time and still succeed fairly easily. But it still takes a few minutes to do when they could have just as easily just asked you to get the fruit and come back whenever you felt like it. There’s a few other instances where I feel there’s way too much downtime. OH. There’s these rooms sometimes where you have to kill every enemy to open the doors. These are bafflingly designed. They tend to have waves of enemies, but there’s this arbitrary wait time in-between waves for no reason at all. That time can be actually weirdly long, like 10-15 seconds until the next wave pops up. If you die, well, that’s extra time being wasted again. Also, if there’s a flying enemy in one of these rooms, they may randomly decide to… not come down and fight you. And a few of these happen in particularly high rooms, so the bad design of flying enemies cause extra problems.

The game loves being unclear about where you’re meant to go. It’ll sometimes even put a waypoint on the map, but then you kinda have to just futz around until you find progress (one time I was meant to go to the Fire Temple, but I had to go to somewhere that I didn’t even know was an entrance to the Fire Temple). There’s a sidequest that asks to find a specific gem or mineral or whatever it was. This, as an item to find, does not exist. Rather, in the pyramid, there’s a detail in the visuals of some red stones broken on the floor, that doesn’t look interactable… it is. You have no way to know unless you happen to walk over that spot and see the button prompt. There’s a lot of similar moments in the game.

This brings me to what might be my biggest complaint… this game is way too long. I’m 27 hours into it, I think I might be in the area before the final dungeon.. and man has this game outlived its welcome. A Metroidvania being this long is definitely a bit much, as I’m probably looking at several more hours still. I know Hollow Knight is also long, but it’s also better and more varied and not quite this long.

Oh and the map sucks. The fact that there’s no minimap is annoying already, so it means you have to press a button to get to the map, and there’s always this animation of your character taking out the map to see it… It’s a bit much. Yeah have the map as a separate button, but also have a decent minimap and don’t waste my time with animations when looking at the map.

Game has glitches. I’ve had a few enemies passing through solid walls, I’ve had specific interactable objects needed to progress just… not working. This led me to have to reset my game and lose 20-25 minutes of progress, a few times. It’s not frequent, but you’ll occasionally get these random issues.

Checkpoints are really fucking weird. Sometimes they just randomly happen. They always happen when you pass by a save point which is fine, though save points are really scattered a lot of the time (sometimes the game spends a LONG time before getting to a following save point). Some doors opening causes a checkpoint to activate, sometimes not. I’ve had a few times where reloading after death brought me back to a save point despite having activated a checkpoint. There’s just something off here. And if you encounter a glitch and have to reset the game entirely… fuck your checkpoints, you’re going back to the last save point.

Overall

Souldiers has all the ingredients for a great Metroidvania, but it has a lot of small things in the recipe that don’t quite jive.

It has good things, namely the boss battles are good and most of the actual structure is sound. But this is kinda ruined by a bad checkpoint system, glitches, time-wasting, a shitty map, some bad enemy designs.

I don’t recommend it, but I don’t not recommend it either. Maybe it’ll click for you where it hasn’t for me.