Soulstone Survivors – PS5 Review 1

Soulstone Survivors is, as you can probably guess, an auto-shooter, rogue-lite game in the same vein as Vampire Survivors and Brotato and it comes to us by way of Brighton-based studio Game Smithing, an oddly drab and functional studio name that might make you think this is just another cheap attempt to cash-in on a genre that is somewhat full of poor clones of the best games in the genre.  But, we’re happy to report that Soulstone Survivors is a whole lot bigger, and better, than most of the auto-shooters clogging up PSN these days.

Unlike most of these sort of games, Soulstone Survivors does provide a little bit of story to get you started.  You play as a Void Hunter who, along with a small army, jumps through a portal to hunt and kill the Void King.  Unfortunately, this all goes wrong and you end up separated from the others and stuck in a mid-sized arena of a level as the enemy army starts closing in.  The story doesn’t matter though but still, it’s nice to see a little bit of production in this genre.

The main gameplay will be familiar to anyone with experience of the genre.  You move around with the left stick and while you can manually aim your attacks with the right, by default your hunter will just attack automatically based on what enemy is nearest.  And that’s really it apart from a dash move which is mapped to L1.  A rather handy dash move it has to be said.  You’ll be spamming that when the going gets tough.

Instead of the usual timed waves that we usually get, Soulstone Survivors bases its progression on how many enemies you kill.  There will be a set target and when you’ve killed that many foes, a ‘Lord of the Void’ will show up.  These are essentially bosses and are a lot more deadly, and durable, than regular enemies.  You’ll usually have to kill five of these before the level is out (although you can expect to face multiples on harder levels).

Along the way, you’ll be doing the usual routine of picking up gems that are dropped by dead enemies and these will level you up until you get to pick a perk or spell (weapons) from a choice of three.  You’ve played Vampire Survivors, you know how this works (and if you haven’t, take care of that RIGHT NOW).  Weapons can be melee, ranged or area of effect affairs and the key to success is getting a good, synergistic build of six weapons that all compliment each other as well as picking the right stats (speed, fire rate, damage, armour and so on) to keep yourself competitive in the fight.

But that’s all pretty standard for this genre and aside from an upgrade from the usual flat 2D sprites into some actual polygonal 3D, on first impressions Soulstone Survivors might seem like more of the same.  And indeed we’ve already seen that type of thing with Remedium: Sentinels which also tried to give the genre a 3D makeover but this game has had a much better profile on PC and that’s probably more down to the huge amount of depth the rest of the game has.

Indeed, there’s a lot to unpack once you’re outside of the actual combat in this game.  The gemstones that you earn in battle are used as currency for all manner of things when you’re in the screens and menus of the overall game.  The most obvious use is for permanent upgrades.  These appear in the Skill Tree screen and allow you to improve, to a degree, all manner of stats.  So this is where you go when you want to improve your attack and defence capabilities before your next run.  There is a shared skill tree for all characters but then individual ones for the characters too.  And there are a lot of them.  There are at least twenty characters and these are unlocked by completing stages with various levels of self-inflicted difficulty (which is added by enabling curses that make the game harder).

And then you get runes which can be equipped and give buffs (and some debuffs) to each character.  These are earned by completing stages with various characters, sometimes within time limits, and add a bit of extra oomph to your combat abilities.  There are also runes that allow characters to use spells that aren’t usually available to them and that’s okay but it’s just a lot and it does mean that eventually all the characters feel a bit samey as you start looking for your favourite spells regardless of the character.

The thing is that all these unlocks require that you keep beating the game’s main five stages over and over.  Sure, sometimes you’ll run them with curses, which certainly makes things tougher, but ultimately there is a lot of grinding required to get everything unlocked and where games like Vampire Survivors and Brotato took hundreds of hours from us, we were always engaged, always interested.  After a while Soulstone Survivors started to get repetitive.

This is even true in combat because while there are a lot of statistics to juggle and builds to optimise, what you don’t feel is a direct connection to the damage that you inflict.  In Brotato, you’re always aware of where you are, where you need to be, how effective your build is.  But here it’s all just a bit of a mess.  Sure, enemies are dying and you’re collecting gems but it can feel quite automatic at times even when the game is difficult.  Likewise, in Vampire Survivors you can usually see your weapons working but in Soulstone Survivors, it’s a lot less clear.  We ended up watching the cooldown timers more than actually seeing the damage happening.  Also, the game is throwing numbers at you constantly, not just damage indicators, but other stuff that we’re not actually sure matters and aren’t clear about what they are for.

For us it’s a bit like when Civilization went from 2D to isometric.  We always preferred the clarity and simplicity of the original and so we’re not sure this genre needs to be 3D.  It’s never messy enough to affect playability but when the CPU is doing the shooting for you, that’s never going to be an issue.

And, to be honest, there’s even more to think about with this game.  The complexity of everything is very much in keeping with modern games.  There’s just a whole lot of faff, a lot to learn and it’s not necessarily apparent which is probably why there is so much discussion online about builds, character tier lists and everything else.

But, for all that moaning, we do like the game.  It’s a solid example of a genre that we really like and trying to get as many hours in as quickly as possible to get this review out isn’t the best way to play it.  If you dip in and out over months, the grind and repetition might not be so bad.  And for all of the complexity of it, the game is playable and addictive for sure, albeit with a constant nagging feeling that we’re not optimised enough.