While the Metroidvania genre has expanded to the point where using the name is almost cliché, occasionally a game pops out that creates renewed respect for both the style and the developers who made it. Souldiers, the new game from Retro Forge and publisher Dear Villagers has the potential to do just that!
The quite aptly named Souldiers is about a group of, well, dead soldiers. Fortunately for them (or perhaps unfortunately), a pair of valkyries found this unit of soldiers and instead of leaving them to their eternal rest, offer to allow them to continue fighting in a second life. Sounds intriguing, right? As your choice of a fighter, archer, or mage, you’ll have to fight through a new world, starting with the cave you and your fellow soldiers end up in. Each character has remarkably different attacks and presents their own challenges. Overall, the fighter is the easiest to use but it’s nice to have options.
This is where the Metroidvania kicks into high gear. You start off in a spider-infested cave with a complex network of tunnels and passageways, locked areas and pits. Normally, games in this genre are convoluted but easy to map in your head as you play but Souldiers has one of the most complex and confusing maps ever and you’ll find that referring to the map system (- on the Switch controller) is an absolute necessity. Fighting your way through the complex spider lair is only the beginning of Souldiers though, and you definitely won’t get far without mastering the combat.
Souldiers uses a more detailed complex system than most games of its ilk, including blocking, a rolling dodge system, and an ever-expanding repertoire of special attacks and items that are integral to your success. Even the simplest enemies can easily kill you and dodging, blocking and then attacking is the only way to survive long enough to find your way through the initial labyrinth. But skill alone won’t be enough.
A variety of potions will eventually be at your disposal. At first, you’ll have a couple of healing potions and a stamina potion or two. Sadly, while restoring your health, save points do not refill your potions. Save points serve multiple functions in Souldiers, allowing you to heal and save in one shot. Additionally, they serve as fast travel points, allowing you to skip from save point to save point around the dungeon. Unfortunately, they don’t let you travel from area to area, forcing you to travel across each area to reach a save point, then jump to the other side with a fast travel to continue on.
Effective use of potions, especially during boss battles, is the key to real progress in Souldiers because combat is brutal and unforgiving. Boss fights are rapid challenging affairs but their attack patterns are fairly standard and a few tries usually nets you a victory if you’ve managed to get a decent feel for the fight. Once you progress further, your potion stock expands, making it easier to succeed and providing you with more options such as a boost to damage, antidotes to poisons and curses and more. The only way to get more (aside from finding random potions in chests) is to buy them at various sale points, primarily next to save points. Sadly, you’ll have to spend your very hard-earned gold to buy absolutely necessary potions.
You might note at this point that there’s been no mention of the game after the Spider Lair. That’s because that’s only the beginning! Once you finally (and it’ll take a while) manage to emerge into the sun again, you’ll find yourself in a huge world, filled with enemies and make your way to the eternal city, where the residents are all immortal and you can upgrade your equipment if you’ve managed to save a few coins from the dungeon and explored all the nooks and crannies in order to find ore to refine your weapons and armor. However, chances are high that you blew all your gold on potions (and you’ll need to) so saving up for upgrades is remarkably challenging and the really good stuff is really expensive, especially when you’re only scrounging up a handful of coins at a time.
Speaking of weapons, armor and other things, it is important to mention that like all good Metroidvania-style games, Souldiers has a fairly robust item system. In addition to potions, you can also gain a variety of equipment by either finding or buying it. Some of the items boost your strength and stamina, provide extra gold, or even show enemy weaknesses and life bars (very handy, that). As you progress, you’ll gain special elemental abilities and taking advantage of them will help you along the way, letting you burn through spider-webs, create sand platforms in key areas and a lot more. Souldiers also features an experience system and each new level adds hit points, stamina and points to upgrade your abilities on a skill tree. Ignoring any of these elements will leave you too weak to proceed.
After exiting the Spider Lair, the game expands rapidly, allowing you to explore the world around you. There are places to go in every direction, but you’ll quickly find that heading in the wrong direction will result in your immediate slaughter, regardless of your skill. This is also the point where the plot really begins in Souldiers. In the city you’ll find that there are a number of plot based conversations and events, tons of people to talk to, and even a bounty board allowing you to hunt down wanted monsters (and they’re definitely challenging to kill). In fact, those bounties are one of the best ways to pay for equipment upgrades but they don’t show up quickly and even as powered up as possible, you’ll struggle to kill the particularly vicious enemies with bounties and claim your reward.
The depth of Souldiers really starts to show at this point, allowing you to slowly gain new abilities which let you revisit areas to find treasures previously inaccessible, fight your way to new areas, and expand your combat skills. Each area brings a wealth of entirely new enemies, new terrain, and new challenges which keep Souldiers fresh and interesting. Even the backgrounds in Souldiers are quite detailed and the visuals are lush and spectacular.
However, there are also some significant issues with Souldiers, at least on the Nintendo Switch. As much as it is an amazing game and quite well designed, the problems with it are numerous. Keep in mind that this review is based on a pre-release Switch build and a day one patch is coming but the contents of that patch are unknown as of the writing of this review. Let’s start with the first and worst of them, the load times. Load times in Souldiers can be counted in actual minutes. That’s not just the occasional load time but every time you transition to another area you’re literally sitting and waiting for the game to load on the Switch like this is the first generation of CD-ROM games before game systems had enough video RAM. In fact, even saving causes significant lag (and you definitely need to save often since it heals you and refills your potions. The entire game essentially freezes every time you save and takes a good half a minute to unfreeze. Note that in other versions of the game, load times are around the ten second mark and the Switch is currently still awaiting a patch to fix these known issues. The publisher has supplied us with a PC copy of the game for comparison and all these pesky problems disappeared in the Steam build.
Then there’s the map system. Souldiers has a complex and convoluted level design that is incredibly well-designed and even the game itself tells you to rely on the map system if you’re lost. Irritatingly, the map system, well, doesn’t work. Sure, there’s a map system and each area is slowly revealed on it as you explore. Unfortunately, as you play and save, sectons of the map disappear rapidly, leaving you with treasure box icons floating in a blank void leaving you struggling to find your way through an endless void of trackless dungeons. It’s just as frustrating as it sounds. Again, on the PC version of the game, everything works perfectly so if Switch is your only option, be patient, an update is definitely coming!
Now, those are some pretty major problems but they aren’t the end. There’s also the matter of the difficulty settings in Souldiers. The game is absolutely brutally challenging. Default difficulty is so high that you’ll feel like the initial dungeon will never end. In fact, to play through and complete this review it was necessary to switch difficulty to easy. Even on easy, you’re going to be challenged because Souldiers is no walk in the park. Bosses will still take multiple tries, enemies will still slaughter you wholesale, and even normal dungeon sections will challenge your skills at every turn. Oddly, the PC version of Souldiers felt easier, but perhaps that’s due to the familiarity of playing through once already and then restarting the game.
Oh, and that’s not all. During the course of this review, at the end of the Spider Lair there’s a button that has to be pushed to extend a bridge to finish off the last sections, reach the boss, and escape. Unfortunately, the button became disabled and even reloading the game did not fix the problem, forcing a full restart from the beginning and hours of lost gameplay. This happened twice, but the second time in another dungeon, a reload was sufficient to re-enable the button. The game also abruptly crashed midway through dungeons on three separate occasions, raising the question of whether the code is really all that stable on the Switch. Combined with the load times, map issues, and exceedingly high difficulty settings, there are a significant number of issues with Souldiers, enough that it could realistically be considered still in beta. For a game that was delayed for a month for fine-tuning, that’s a pretty big problem. This type of glitch also did not appear on the PC version of the game. Chances are it’s simply a port problem to the Switch and it’s safe to assume that at some point it will all be rectified!
Here’s the thing. Souldiers is a brilliant game with excellent design elements, complex gameplay, a satisfying story, and lush pixel graphics. But on the Switch (but not other consoles or PC) it’s also a hot mess of programming issues that make it very difficult and frustrating to stick with a game that is absolutely struggling to give you the radiantly engaging adventure that it teases. The sheer frustration of seeing a great game held back by optimization issues is infuriating. And honestly, the vast majority of gamers will struggle to have the patience to wait for interminable Switch load screens over and over or dredge through map after map only to have them disappear before you can figure out where the tiny spots you’ve missed to complete a random subquest are. That’s an absolute tragedy because Souldiers is absolutely excellent in every design aspect. But at $20, you’d expect a game to play properly and the simple fact is that it doesn’t. Hopefully the patch will address these issues and if so, this review will be updated accordingly but as it stands, Souldiers is an outstanding Metroidvania couched in a plethora of technical issues that significantly impact enjoyment of the game itself on the Switch so if you can grab it for a different system or wait a bit, it’s well worth your time!
This review is based on a digital copy of Souldiers provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played (and loaded) equally on both. Please note that the Switch review build of Souldiers did not have the patch available and major issues are only on the Switch. Souldiers is also available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam.