Souldiers
Fight for your freedom in a sprawling fantasy world caught between the living and the fallen. Hone your skills in a retro epic featuring puzzle platforming, metroidvania exploration and crunchy soulslike combat.
Souldiers is a metroidvania, pixel graphics and action game
developed by Retro Forge
and published by Dear Villagers.
Released on June 02nd 2022 is available only on Windows
in 7 languages: English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Portuguese - Brazil.
It has received 2,499 reviews of which 1,691 were positive and 808 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.6 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 4.99€ on Steam and has a 75% discount.
The Steam community has classified Souldiers into these genres:
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Requirements
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Windows
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: 2.4GHz (4 Core) CPU
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1060 | AMD Radeon RX 580
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I had held off on this game due to the negative reviews, I really wish i had not. Wow, great game. This was a meaty adventure leaving me wanting for the sequel. COMBAT: Feels great. Responsive, fluid, multiple specials(magic and stamina based), and a Element Weakness/Resistance system with Debuffs. Your character levels up as you get kills and will get points to learn new moves and buffs. Most enemy attacks are well telegraphed and never seemed unfair, you have a dodge, block and jump to deal with them. DIFFICULTY: I chose Warrior. The difficulty felt perfect, not too easy not too hard, nothing ever felt unfair or too random. The hardest parts are the boss battles (as it should be) but once I stopped smashing the attack button every second and learned the attack patterns i dealt with them pretty quick. Also several types of healing and buff items to make it easier which you can buy and upgrade. LENGTH: Yes this is a meaty game, but felt finished and not padded out. Good level cohesion, themes, and lots of secrets to find. By the end i felt like I had my fill and was done. I did not play NG+ much but it is there and you retain some... stuff. I played as a swordsman, you will need to also play new save files as a mage and archer to get all achievements. STORY: Interesting enough, i was curious to see how it ended. There was some things i would have liked touched on a bit more (like the gods) . The best part is the ending and it really leaves off on a cliff hanger. I do hope they make that sequel! CONCLUSION: Hidden gem, one of the best metroidvanias iv played since Hollow Knight. Now to go back to waiting for Silksong...
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A game with an extremely convoluted map full of secrets and a rather complex system of combat for which I only have ten major criticisms. The first is that the conflict between the player and Anubis does not appear to be fully resolved, as Anubis merely orders the player to leave his pyramid without ever confronting them directly and is never heard from again, despite promising that the player "won't receive the same compassion" if they return to his pyramid. The second is that the conflict between the player and the Pirates of the Broken Wing also does not seem to be fully resolved, as their leader, Captain Birk, flees with his mech suit completely unscathed and is never seen again, and the other Pirates keep showing up on the Croma's Floating Module to attack the player . The third is that it is never explained why a servidrone is working with Dark Claw . The fourth is that neither Arkzel nor Riva seems to appear at all after the player character enters Terragaya, even after the player defeats Parasite Zero . The fifth is that sound effects sometimes play multiple times in a few seconds, which is quite common when using pig bombs . This genuinely scared me when it occurred the instant I opened a chest in the Floating Module and obtained an Enchanted Pendant++, though I only recall hearing it on my second playthrough. The sixth, which only applies to Archers, is that if you throw your bow to enter a hydrobubble, you'll need to press the jump button twice to be launched, even though you only need to press the jump button once to be launched if you enter the hydrobubble by hitting it with an arrow . The Caster seems to have a similar problem, but I can't quite tell which attack it applies to. The seventh is that the game's bestiary does not indicate when an enemy is healed by a certain element, such as how Nautilions are healed by water and electricity . The eighth has to do with the game's abundance of textual errors when the language is set to English, such as the use of the Spanish word pero in one of the bestiary's entries. While I often find encountering such errors amusing, I am only frustrated by them when they impede my understanding of the text. The ninth is that starting a game on Game+ mode erases all unused Mastery Relics, making learning all of the masteries impossible . The tenth has to do with how significantly the difficulty drops when beginning Game+ mode. Because of it, I defeated the Gnoll, Dark Lance, and Iktala easily, taking only a few seconds to finish each fight, when I expected each battle to last far longer. I would criticize how the Dark Warriors do not seem to be aware of how closely the player character resembles them on Game+ mode, but then I remembered that they might not be aware of what they have become, especially not of their red, glowing eyes. Now I'm wondering if I'm the only one who finds the performance issues that always arise during the race against Euder oddly satisfying. Did I mention how much I love the attack Dark Razor unleashes after he takes enough damage? It's very unique, being a series of razors thrown across the arena in a massive cloud of smoke.
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Really fun, engrossing game. A lot of reviewers complained about the massive levels, but they didn't feel too large to me. That might have been a problem if the gameplay wasn't fun, but combat is engaging (sometimes tough but never unfair), the controls are mostly tight and it's overall a blast. The visuals are excellent, filled with little touches that really make the environments stand out. Neat things like how your fire element doesn't work underwater and the lighting element actually makes water damaging to the player and enemies... great attention to detail. The game is not perfect of course. I do agree that the game gives you too many tools, but not simply because they exist. It's having access to all of them, having to cycle through them all the time that's bothersome, especially the subweapons. There should have perhaps been a dedicated button for healing potions and the ability to equip a few tools on other dedicated slots, Dark Souls style. The map is fine but it could have used some improvements, like enabling marking locations and scrolling around the map on the fast travel screen. I would have also liked to be able to customize the player character. It seems like the game is filled with interesting characters but your soldier isn't one of them. Outside of that, I see no issue with the game. It's massive but not bloated, enjoyable to explore and return to the environments with new abilities and it's kept me engaged for the nearly thirty hours I've played it as of this writing. Pretty sure I'm going to finish it and probably play through a second time with a different class. I recommend it at full price, even though I got it on sale.
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Disclaimer: I am halfway through the game, so this is an early review. Overview I will start by saying this game, even with its flaws, is definitely worth a buy. At its current patch I have not encountered a single bug or performance hit in 20 hours of play. There is a lot that is well done here and if I had to score it, it would end up at around 7.5/10 The Good [*]Good Art [*]Good Combat [*]Interesting boss fights [*]Interesting Puzzles [*]Inventive use of upgrades The Bad [*]Poorly paced levels [*]Metroidvania implementation [*]Balancing and pacing The Meh [*]OST [*]Story Analysis Art The art is absolutely incredible, there is no other way to put it. Characters have so many animations, everything you do is so tactile. Open your map and the character pulls the map from the backpack, drink potions, different skills and combos are animated differently, there is so much variety here. City folks are doing their daily routine fully animated, with variations on NPCs that fill it up. Dungeons are varied so it feels like you are really traversing this world. Sound This one is a mixed bag for me, I do not really like old repetitive OSTs, so most of the music did not really do anything for me. The only one, so far, that I really loved was the Sewer one. General SFX are good, it is just the music itself that is a little lacking in my opinion. Story Nothing to write home about, there is some interesting world building and the concept surrounding the world with it essentially being Valhala, and how different species and worlds end up here after death . Characters motivations are good enough, they are usually tropes but not bad. There is also a different responses from NPCs as you progress through the story, which is always nice. Combat Combat got me pleasantly surprised, there is a lot going on in terms of mechanical difficulty and variety. There is 3 classes, being your knight, archer and mage. They all play differently, with different skill trees and moveset. You have your standard dodge, block and parry, but you also have elemental affinities that need to be swapped on the fly, a counter dodge mechanic that gives you an extra dodge. The game throws different enemies with different elements and different attack patterns, so you need to manage positioning and elemental affinity quite quickly. I am playing on Master difficulty and it makes me have to pay attention to every single encounter, as you can die quite quickly. As the Archer you also have a refillable ammo meter, meaning you need to balance close range with medium range combat. Overall there is a lot of good things going on here, with the main negative being its tool weapons system, where you get different consumable weapons that recharge. Most of them are weak, which takes a little from the experience, and because the ammo for them is scarce, I end up saving them to stronger enemies and bosses, taking some of the spontaneity out of it. Metroidvania There are some good ideas and looping areas, but it loses track of what makes Metroidvania levels fun: exploration and mystery. The game is structured in such a way that levels end up being linear, you find an upgrade in a dungeon, then go back to the same dungeon to get more loot and more upgrades, and you then find the final boss. There is little sense of true exploration, back tracking and secrets. When you go back to a dungeon, it is usually a really small portion of it that actually uses these upgrades. The game does have quite a few of movement upgrades though, wall jumping, double jumping, air dashing and interaction between the elemental affinity and objects. Such as sand crystals that create temporary sand platforms or activating electrical machinery with your electrical powers. Balancing I think this is the worst part of the game. Checkpoints can be sparse, which can mean you can lose 20 minutes of progress in an instant. This is compounded by the fact this game leans on RPG elements such as percentage based amulet drops from monsters, which you can lose if you die before saving with them and consumables. This causes unfortunate interactions with the save and checkpoint system, the save system works in a way that only player triggered saves are permanent, and checkpoints are temporary during that play session. This means that you might get a checkpoint before a boss, with no consumables, and if you quit out you will lose progress. This was very clear in a section where you fight 3 bosses in a row, with a save point after the first one. If you do not save, or do not purchase potions after the first fight, you will not be able to go back to buy more for the second two. As there is no way to know 2 more boss fights are coming, this is a point where players might get stuck. Tools are all over the place, with most of them being useless, the resource to upgrade them is also very common, making the fact that so many of them are unusable even more pronounced. Lastly, to the devs, if you end up reading this. I hope you continue on your gamedev careers, the game had a rough release with rough reception but I can see a lot of care and good ideas here. Best of luck!
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Picked up this game cause it looks great and a lot of comments talk about its challenging nature. Playing it so far, I think the biggest problem is having to override the simpler instincts you learn from other metroidvania games. Your strength in this game seems to be divided among multiple abilities that each have cooldowns - forcing you to learn how to use them in sequence in order to do any real damage. If you just spam the attack button, you'll hit like a wet noodle and enemy health bars will seem endless. Instead, you need to chain dash-special-heavy-jump-grenade combos while spamming light attack where applicable. Its the same with your defensive powers - you've got dashing, jumping, and a shield, but they've got cooldowns which prevent you from relying on only one of them. You've got to respond to the enemies' chain attacks with a dodge-block-jump combo of your own. There's definitely a learning curve here, but as long you get the hang of using all of the game's mechanics, the difficulty becomes much more manageable. ----- Okay...second impression after beating the game. Of the three mechanics of primary element, secondary weapon, and equipped potion, only the primary element gets a quick wheel. Secondary Weapon and Potion you have to flip through in list form and there are just too many secondary weapons and potion types in the game to do it like that. So many times during a boss fight where I'll find myself fumbling through my potion wheel. I'd like to use the crit chance potion here for bonus damage, but now I've missed the window and will have to wait the next round...oops took some damage, now I'll need to flip through to the healing potion. Other than that, solid game.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 20 November 2024 13:06 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 19 December 2024 20:39 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 12:00 |
Online players
44
Developer
Retro Forge
Publisher
Dear Villagers
Release
02 Jun 2022
Platforms
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