Review by Jon Donnis
Souldiers is a 2D side scrolling adventure platform game.
The game starts off with a nice cartoon intro, and once you start the game proper you choose a class for your hero.
"Unleash the fury of your sword with the Scout, summon the wrath of elements with the Caster, or rain down arrows on your foes with the Archer."
The game will instantly remind you of some of the classic SNES games, both in looks and sounds.
The story is as follows
"While out fighting for the glory of their kingdom, you and your fellow soldiers are whisked away to Terragaya, a mystical land on the fringes of the afterlife. Your task is to locate the Guardian and move on to the next world. The hitch? You and your compatriots never actually died."
The complete your goals you will need to "slash, parry and dodge" through enemy after enemy, explore, and talk to other characters, and as you go you will be able to upgrade your skills and improve your equipment. You can dodge with rolls, and block your enemy, as well as jump out of the way too. All pretty standard combat stuff.
The fighting itself is decent, and the learning curve is just on the right side of tough.
Of the three classes you can choose from the Scout is the most intuitive, the Caster and the Archer class just seem a bit harder to get used to.
The graphics as you may have guessed is retro 2D pixel art. Everything looks as it should, and everything moves nice and smooth.
Boss fights are challenging, and you may find yourself taking multiple attempts to learn the patterns so you can finally overcome them.
The in-game map is excellent and will really help you keep track of everything from the save points, to points of interest, locked doors, chests and so on, this is important as you will need to backtrack often. There are RPG elements in the game, but they are not as important as you might expect, grinding is kept to a minimum, your character will improve as they pass levels too.
The Good
Beautiful animated pixel art, easy to pick up and play, and a fair learning curve.
The Bad
I hate backtracking in a game, some would say it is part of the genre, but I just want to get on with it and keep heading forward. The sounds etc are all very retro, and I turned the sound off to be brutally honest as the beeps and noise of scrolling text, which was very FF7 like, just started to annoy me.
Overall
A simple, fun 2D pixel platform adventure game.
Won't break any records, but also is a fine addition to your collection.
I score Souldiers on PS5 a fair 7/10
Out Now on PS5
