SOULDIERS ANALYSIS

The first hours of Souldiers are interesting. Several keywords (meteridvania; pixel art; perhaps souls-Like, if we look at the title?) That can take you to suspect that you have already played other similar ones; They can take you to wait for something that the first hours strive to contradict. The start may sound to you: the army of which you are part of is surprised by a collapse and ends, with the mediation of a Valkyria, in Terragaya, a land between life and death for which you have to make its way in search of the way to return to your world. You almost die, but no; Atacas, jumps, wheels to dodge the attacks of the creatures with which you are crossing; You end up facing a first boss who can put the most difficult things than you expected if you don't play cautiously. You finally enter the arachnid den, following your classmates.

You advance through the arachnid lair, and here you begin to see the similar ones. The map is forming as you travel, showing you the points of interest that you can return later if you still do not need to interact with them. You find a mysterious stone, one of the five you need to open the door that will allow you to get out of there. Following your group towards the depths of the den, you find that a few have lost and others have died. Trapped in the fabric of one of the not a few spiders that populate the galleries you find Balof, a merchant that gives you, as a show of thanks after rescuing it, some bombs. There is one of the keywords! Thanks to these bombs you can break some walls, opening new paths that allow you to go further; These bombs end up being fundamental to get the rest of stones you need to reach the final boss of this first dungeon, surprisingly long and dense, complex and full of enemies, traps, puzzles. You continue to internally in the depths of the arachnid den and suddenly you stay in the dark: luckily, your newly obtained fire powers allow you to light the torches that serve as points of light with which to guide you through the labyrinth. You advance perenously through the cave, dying here and there, losing progress but also getting further and further; You finally reach the chief's hiding place, obviously a gigantic spider that sends you to the other neighborhood with a few blows. You keep trying and finally defeat the boss. Sales of the arachnid lair. Several hours have passed; You have the feeling that you have learned to heads, losing and dying, familiarizing you with the map for the bad ones. Terragaya is a hostile site, but seeing the light from the outside comforts you. You are out! You've got it.

Sales and a nice jumping skun throws a hammer in the head and kills you. More than an arisco "do not relax", the lesson could be another: take advantage of the rare moments of relaxation that are presented to you, because you do not know when there will be another.

Souldiers is thus an action and exploration game in which you cover a wide world formed by several interconnected areas that are opening more and more as you get new artifacts and skills. In your adventure to find the Guardian of Terragaya to find a way to return to your world you cross with all kinds of characters and enemies; Each zone is presented with an exquisite pixel art and a formidable soundtrack and that at times remembers that of Terranigma, two points where he is surely closer to having been able to go on Saturn than in Super Nintendo. The controls are more contemporary: the jump and basic attacks accompany them the possibility of shooting through attacks and enemies and blocking their attacks; According to the class you choose, you can also make a parry or attack at a distance, which significantly modifies the way you approximate the specific challenge represented by the moveset of each enemy. There is an inventory of equipment and consumable objects; There is a skill tree; There are main and secondary missions, and even a planning board that you can take to get a few extra coins to invest in different improvements for your equipment and your artifacts, which also require materials often hidden in the most unexpected corners of dungeons, scarce and therefore valuable.

It has almost everything, but nothing in an inappropriate or exaggerated amount; There is a good balance between each piece, although Souldiers does not always make it equally easy to see it. For being 2D and for having a more or less nice visual style it may not seem like it, but Souldiers is huge. Everything is huge. The Hafin scale, capital of Terragaya, remembers more at the imperial scale of Anor Londo or Lendell than to the towns to which other similar games have accustomed us; The dungeons are authentic resistance tests, surprisingly long and complex, something that is already seen in which it serves as contact with the game but that is confirmed as soon as you step on the next. It is a rare ambition, and still there are few checks that extend here and that Retro Forge cannot pay, even if the payment is not always immediate.

On the contrary, the pieces in Souldiers usually take their time until you fit at all. His design philosophy is obsessed with the idea of the postponed reward, which takes to arrive but, in theory, offers greater satisfaction when it is finally received. The design of levels, for example, is full of recesses and false advances that take you to places you still cannot access; When you put the dungeon again, you always present mechanisms or paths that were inaccessible to you the first time you saw them, and (almost) there are always valuable resources on the other side, although, again, its utility is not immediate: they can Spend several hours between the moment you get such as Pedrusco and the long-awaited improvement that allows you to take advantage of its effects. Three quarters of the same with the enemies, both the bosses and the most normal, who squeeze but do not drown, although they often seem to do so. Learning their routines and the most optimal ways to face them is a process not always equally obvious but that ends up being very satisfactory, especially for those who enjoy seeing how challenges that the first times seemed unfair or exaggerated are becoming more assumed until you give with the correct key; In Souldiers the fighting never cease to be demanding, but they do soften quite a lot as you learn to take them with some caution, to take advantage of all the resources that allow you to scratch some more damage of more and to maximize the window of opportunity you have To fit blows, not always as wide or safe.

The entire game is actually three very large postponement experiments, one for each class that you can choose at the beginning of the game. Each has attributes, movements and trees of its own improvements, and although the basics is common for the three (it is the same game: exploring, jumping, attacking) the way of playing is very different. The scout becomes the basic warrior, and it is played as expected: with his sword and his shield, the scout is a tank character that forces you to get a lot to harm you; His blows are strong but proximity makes it more exposed. In return you have a parry and you are unlocking skills that allow you to stun the enemies, for example, or improvements that expand the versatility of the blockade. The wizard throws magic, and can do a lot of damage thanks to his remote control attacks, quite lazy but very accurate. Little by little, his possibilities to launch great attacks grow but his health and his defensive options are always limited, which forces to maintain distances and pay attention not to receive more blows from the account. The goalkeeper, on the other hand, attacks at a distance and is very agile, with a set of very acrobatic movements and many resources to harm and get safely. It is the class I have played least, and also seems the most complicated of the three.

There are three ways of playing well differentiated and that also represent one of the greatest buts of Souldiers: their little flexibility and the dilated steps that are moving forward the game end up giving a slightly uncertain sense of immobility but that makes a second game a lot Below what you remembered, and that the extent to which your decisions can affect the result of a specific situation is not always so obvious. The improvements offered by elementary transformations or talismans are at the same time very subtle and very crucial; Going out of doing 15 damage with a blow may not seem much if you only look at the number, but the improvement is much more noticeable when instead of four you need three blows to eliminate such an enemy. It is not a game of builds, without a doubt, but it could surely have benefited from allowing more experimentation and expediting progress by skill trees. The same in the dungeons: I personally love that they are long and dense, with a very brutal difficulty and traps and rooms that know how to surprise not only for pure variety but also because of the ingenuity of the solutions they arrive to create interesting challenges, But dying is so easy that in the end it ends up encouraging you to play conservatively, avoiding danger and dodging enemies when you know you are too hurt, too dry and too far from a storage point to stop to fight or explore even be One option. Potions of all kinds are scarce; The chips that allow you to use the artifacts (bombs, but also spears or blinding grenades, for example), also: that is why it often seems more sensible not to use anything, save and save everything for when it comes a time worse. Of those there are always.

You have to feel like a challenge like the one proposed by Souldiers, because otherwise I think it is the type of game that can trample you without waiting for you; I think that something like a middle ground could have been reached, a point where the difficulty was not less but there would be fewer deaths that make you lose more progress than you want to repeat, less control points that enclose you with a Chief and a blow of dying, less painful escapes as a headless chicken in search of a safe corner that consults on the map in search of the nearest storage point. (In the case of Switch, where I have played my game as scout, performance problems and excessively long load times do not help anything; a patch is expected to solve these roughness soon, but at the time of writing this the situation is Too serious not to mention it. In Steam it is an infinitely softer and more pleasant experience.) But I recognize that I repeat and repeat and accumulate and accumulate until you finally overcome the challenge, kill the boss or you pass the dungeon, It is something that is very pleasant and very attractive; I have found a lot of pile in Souldiers , and that is why it has been fascinating, hard but always with something to offer in return.

[8]