Soulstone Survivors review

Fun with portals.
Soulstone Survivors

With so many “Survivors” games in the wild nowadays, if a new one wants to stand out it needs to do something different. That might be using an existing IP as a jumping-off point like Deep Rock Galactic Survivors, or changing a few fundamental elements of the genre like Hordes of Hunger. Or, as in the case of Soulstone Survivors from Game Smithing, it could simply pack in so much content that it leaves most other pretenders in the dust.

Soulstone Survivors follows the basic template of the genre. You take control of a single hero and must venture into enclosed arenas, staying mobile to avoid damage while your various attacks and abilities activate automatically on cooldowns. Enemies drop XP in the form of diamonds and you hoover them up, filling the XP bar over and over again to unlock new abilities and buffs to your core stats and attributes.

Soulstone Survivors

However, one way in which Soulstone Survivors stands out is in the number of available heroes. There are 22 to unlock, each with a variety of different base weapons, and each with their own fairly expansive skill tree to unlock permanent buffs and upgrades. Most follow a similar template and have a dodge mapped to LB on a controller, but one of them is mounted and moves quickly enough not to need the dodge at all.

Although they all have different base stats and weapons, playing with various heroes doesn’t feel all that different as the spread of skills and abilities seems to be universal. There are ground slams, poison clouds, columns of fire; you can drop exploding barrels on enemies, summon turrets and totems, or even companions. Certain skills apply effects like Slow, Bleed, Weakness, and Burn, and upgrades you select from a set of three each time you level up can increase the potency of each effect.

Soulstone Survivors

But you can also increase health, damage, crit-chance, and movement speed, or add to your armour and AoE range. Runs are still slightly luck-dependent, but you earn XP so fast that you’ll level up at a rate of knots anyway. In the standard mode you roam the map alone or with three friends, mashing through enemies, looking for bosses and special crystals. The backstory is that you’re a Void Hunter, an elite warrior pursuing a dangerous tyrant through multiple dimensions via portals.

Due to this element, there are also a couple of other modes thrown in. The first is an arena mode where you fight through cycles, defeating half a dozen bosses each time. As you slay bosses and begin a new cycle, you’ll lose all your equipped skills and need to select 6 different ones. There’s also a boss rush mode where you’ll need to slay “Titans”, whose blood is used by the Lords of the Void to open portals. There are snippets of story throughout, but it feels a little under-cooked and over-acted, and probably isn’t super necessary to proceedings.

In addition to skill trees and weapons you can upgrade in a blacksmith tab, you can also unlock a huge array of runes that you then equip for even more buffs. You can have 8 in total, with three directly affecting certain skills and the others boosting attributes. Of course, the unlocking itself is a grind, but you can’t fault Soulstone Survivors for being lean.

Soulstone Survivors

It’s also really fun to play. I don’t care much for the constant shouts from characters that get repetitive very quickly, but the gameplay itself is very fast and quite slick. Enemies will spawn endlessly until you defeat all the bosses, and some of the bosses feel like real challenges. Having spent so long in early access, Game Smithing have been able to tweak and add to the 22 characters, creating some interesting synergies between them and the enemies you face.

It may not be the most original game, but simply by stacking so much content into a relatively small space, it manages to stand apart for fans of the genre. If you enjoy Survivors-style games and are craving something that feels new and will occupy you for hours, Soulstone Survivors is well worth your time.

Summary
If you enjoy Survivors-style games and are craving something that feels new and will occupy you for hours, Soulstone Survivors is well worth your time.
Good
  • Lots of characters
  • Loads to unlock
  • Plenty of content
Bad
  • Story is forgettable
  • Gameplay can get repetitive
  • Can be hard to see your character
8
Great

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