Game Reviews

Spectral Souls

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Spectral Souls

Tactical RPG is a funny sort of a genre to try and cram into a phone.

It produces cavernous games, usually clocking in at well over the fifty hour mark, presented in huge slabs instead of the manageable portions that have proved so successful on smartphones.

Spectral Souls is no exception. It's a behemoth that makes no concession to building a user-friendly experience. But has it found a more comfortable home on Sony's Xperia Play?

Soul destroying

As in most tactical RPGs, you play a band of impossible-haired characters with various individual roles to play in battle. You have to fight your way through isometric 3D battlegrounds, uncovering nonsensical conspiracies and getting involved in convoluted plots.

There's a neat and innovative risk vs reward attack-chaining system that means more attentive battlers can gain huge attack bonuses.

Attacks by characters who follow one another in the battle sequence can be grouped together, but if any of the characters takes damage before his turn you'll miss out on the bonus.

Soul doubt

The D-pad and face buttons on the Xperia Play make controlling the battle a pleasant experience, although they don't add a great deal to the touchscreen controls available on other Android devices.

Moving the cursor around to select where your characters move and who they attack is simple enough, but sometimes the action gets obscured by scenery, and finding a useful camera angle can prove a bit tricky.

Spectral Souls isn't going to change your mind about tactical RPGs, and nor is it going down in history as one of the best in its class.

However, with the slightly improved controls and the different audience that Sony's device is trying to pull in, it feels like a better fit on the Xperia Play than it did on a standard phone.

This isn't a game you can just pick up and play, but if you're after a title with a huge amount of depth you could do a lot worse.

Spectral Souls

The Xperia Play doesn't add enough to make Spectral Souls worth a second look if you've already tried it, but it's the best platform to experience it on for the first time
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.