Game Reviews

SoulCraft

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SoulCraft
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It's pretty rare that a developer gets the freemium dungeon-crawler right. Most turn what could be an exquisite exercise in hitting things into a drudge that few are capable of enjoying.

If you take the loot out of the dungeon and drop it into a shop, all you have left are are endless, lumpen, dull thwacks. Which pretty much sums up SoulCraft.

Hell on earth

The game casts you as an angel, sent down to Earth after the end of days to try and clear out the hordes of hell, reclaiming their souls to spend on new armour and equipment and generally making a holy nuisance out of yourself.

You control your movements with a stick on the left of the screen, and your basic weapon attacks with a stick on the right. There are two types of weapon at your disposal - heavy hammers that have a large arc of attack or lighter staffs with more range but a smaller hit zone.

As you progress through the game you'll unlock different spells and attacks, and these appear as buttons on the screen. You also have a variety of potions at your disposal, which you can use to heal by tapping their icon.

Immortal combat

There are five cities to work your way through, each with increasingly more difficult variations on the same five game modes. These range from simple wave attacks to frantic portal dashes, giant boss battles, and defending a crystal from the hellions.

The problem is that the combat - the real meat of any game like this - just isn't good enough. And pretty soon you'll learn that all you need to do to succeed is back away from enemies, keeping enough distance so their attacks miss and yours hit.

While the different game modes try to keep things fresh, they're thwarted by the same repetitive, grinding combat. This is a dungeon-crawler stripped of all the things that make dungeon-crawling so addictive. The end result isn't abjectly terrible, it's not much fun either.

SoulCraft

While it has occasional moments of excitement, SoulCraft is another freemium dungeon-crawler in an increasingly long line that get their balancing all wrong
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.