Soulstice: Deluxe Edition

Soulstice is a competent action game with creative monsters, but they're doomed to live in a bland setting with tedious level design.

A meaty action game let down by a persistently rubbish camera and a lack of variation in its stages.

"Opening and closing fields to match the thing you're trying to kill has all the fussiness of a game of Simon Says – in that nothing you do counts unless you've remembered to hit the right button first"

Soulstice is a dress shirt with a couple wrinkles, an action RPG that succeeds with some hiccups.

Soulstice's terrible camera holds back an otherwise ambitious and inspired action game.

Combining a well-realized dark fantasy setting inspired by Claymore and Berserk and an engaging story with solid action gameplay inspired by some of the best character action games, Soulstice is a competent action title. Unfortunately, issues like the horrible camera and the mediocre handling of color-coded enemies and mechanics impact the experience, preventing it from being the great character action game it had the potential to be.

Soulstice makes no secret of what influenced it, both in aesthetics and in gameplay mechanics.

The battles earn enough points for Soulstice, but in other, very basic parts, the title ends up mediocre.

It may not immediately aspire to the same household-name status as some of its sources of inspiration, but fans of the [action RPG] genre would be hard-pressed to not find plenty to enjoy here.

I really wanted to love Soulstice. Briar and Lute have an interesting story to tell and most of the voice work is really well done here. The memory parts drag on for way too long and Briar is for some reason both huge and naked in them? I guess that’s a plus for people who have an undying desire to see drawn nipples in games, but it felt completely unnecessary.