I didn’t know basically anything about Eldest Souls going in, but it ended up being a lot of fun. Like Titan Souls it’s a boss battler, but the mechanics are much more complex, which in turn makes the experience richer (but requiring more investment).
Like most 2D action games, you can move around and swing your weapon to attack. You also have a charge attack, which isn’t uncommon, but what’s unique about it here is that it sends you forward a huge distance (making it great for closing the gap with a boss after you’ve backed off) and landing the attack grants you a buff known as Bloodthirst. Bloodthirst decays over time but grants you lifesteal and increased attack speed, and you can spend it all to use a powerful attack known as Bloodburst.
The core combat loop is swooping in with a charge attack, getting in a few Bloodthirst-empowered hit, Bloodbursting, then backing off. Which is easy to say, and much harder to do when the boss is constantly attacking. Of course, as a game with “Souls” in the title, you also have a stamina-gated dodge roll. You can roll three times in a row and stamina recovers slowly, but rolling through an enemy hit is free. In other words, you’re limited in how often you can do defensive rolls away from the boss, but high-risk aggressive rolls weaving through their attacks don’t cost any momentum.
Complementing the basic mechanics is a skill system allowing you to customize your playstyle. There are three stances—one for mobility, one for offense, and one for defense—with two skill trees each. You can only ever put skills in one stance at a time, but you can split your skill points between that stance’s skill trees as you like (although you usually want to sink all your points in one to get the best skills at the end) and freely change your skills at any time, allowing you to experiment and adapt.
The way each stance generally works is that you have a bar that gets filled up by doing certain actions, and when it’s filled up you can activate the stance’s special move—for instance, a counter in the defensive stance. Skills often change or augment how your basic moves function or interact with each other, so keeping track of that on top of the basic charge-bloodthirst-bloodburst cycle can be a bit overwhelming at first. But eventually you get the hang of it, and learn both the general attack pattern you want to perform and how you can weave that within each boss’ behavior.
You get a skill point for each boss you defeat, allowing your build to slowly come online over the course of the game, as well as a “boss core,” which can further augment and customize your build. You have several slots for boss cores, generally corresponding to each move you can do (as well as a boss core-specific active ability slot). Each boss core has a unique effect for each possible slot, although each boss core has a general pattern for the type of effect it has. For instance, a certain boss core will have the effect of dealing increased damage in exchange for health when above 50% health and reduce damage in exchange for healing when below 50% health no matter where you put it, but the exact way it does that is tied to the move corresponding to the slot you put it in.
While the combat basics don’t change, your selection of stance, skills and boss cores can greatly affect your playstyle, and let you find something that works for you.
There are multiple weapons, but because of the way the unlock conditions function you’ll likely only get one or two per playthrough, and they are tailor-made for specific playstyles, so by the time you unlock an appropriate weapon it will likely complement your existing playstyle rather than change or expand it.
Bosses are large and varied. They’re tough, with some much more difficult than others—although the specifics will vary from person to person. I found the second quarter of the game the most difficult, since that was the stage where you were past the tutorial bosses, but before you had system mastery or the tools to construct an effective build. Boss health compared to damage seems especially high in that stage of the game… but I made it through (eventually)!
While I liked the bosses overall, there are some free DLC bosses that felt a bit problematic. A large portion of the fights is learning the boss’ patterns and how to dodge their attacks, but the first DLC boss has so many projectiles that that basically felt impossible. The second boss had mechanics that felt impossible to figure out, which made it feel luck-based. Specifically, the boss can poison you, and there are fountains in the arena that can clear the poison—but it seemed like the fountains were available only randomly. So you had to hope that the fountains turned on enough to let you kill the boss before the poison killed you. And the third DLC boss was actually fine. (I saw people online complain that the boss sprite would cover an AOE indicator for one of its attacks, resulting in what felt like an unforeseen instant KO. That did happen to me once or twice, but then I just started avoiding that blind spot—and, because of the angle of the game’s camera, pretty much every boss has a blind spot like that, so it’s not like it was specific to that boss.)
The game actually provides much more clear and explicit lore than most Souls-like games, giving a full explanation of the game’s background in the opening cutscene. Of course, we don’t really care about that—we’re just here to kill everything that has a giant health bar.
Graphics are pixel-based, with pixel art textures sometimes applied on 3D models to create a 2D-3D effect. Regardless, it’s crisp and beautiful. The setting feels a lot like Yharnam, with ruined, abandoned structures and a dark, heavy atmosphere.
There are some side quests, which involve talking to different NPCs and fetching items around the game world for them. There is one side quest that has four different resolutions, each providing a unique buff—this is the only part of your build that can’t be freely changed.
Going through the game and beating all the bosses is a fun, challenging and complete experience, but there is additional depth if you want it. (Which, for the record, I didn’t.) Each boss has an “abyssal” version with an enhanced moveset, providing extra challenge, and there are achievements for beating each boss without getting hit. Plus you need multiple playthroughs to unlock all the weapons and can test out different builds, so while Eldest Souls doesn’t have the replayability of something like Monster Hunter, there was still care put into it to provide more than the initial playthrough.
One other great thing about Eldest Souls is that when you die you can just immediately restart the fight. While the boss runs in Titan Souls were short, they still added up over the course of the game…
Eldest Souls is tough, and requires a bit more investment than Titan Souls, but the fact that it has free customization and is distilled down to the boss battles makes it an easy pick-up if you are looking for a short but challenging action game.
No comments:
Post a Comment