Immediate stick feel and defense inputs
The first five minutes tell you everything about what kind of action game this wants to be. Soul responds fast on the stick, snapping into sprints and blade swings without that heavy, artificial deadzone drag that ruins a lot of modern third-person combat titles. You feel the immediate pull of your primary weapon right away, and defensive tools like deflecting and dodging buffer reliably off neutral ground.
Where it gets slippery is during recovery out of basic strings. Swapping between attacks and defensive answers looks blisteringly quick, yet the visual recovery blends straight into prolonged martial arts flourishes. When an enemy assassin thrusts from outside your screen, Soul is often still finishing the trailing spin of a flourish, leaving you guessing whether your guard input caught the active strike or slipped right through the gap. Having full English voice and text out of the box makes the opening tutorials painless, but your hands will need an hour just to parse what is genuine recovery lag versus pure visual swagger.
Arsenal depth across thirty primary blades
S-GAME packed a ridiculous pile of gear into this sixty-dollar release. You have access to over thirty primary weapons and more than twenty secondary Phantom Edges taken off defeated bosses and elite targets. Swapping between weapons mid-skirmish restores stamina and keeps pressure going, which turns simple duels into prolonged juggle routines once you learn the sequences.
The problem lies in weapon identity. A huge chunk of those thirty blades pull from similar chain rhythms. You hit light strings, trigger a heavy finisher, and cancel into a secondary edge strike to crack armor. It looks incredible on screen with sparks throwing light into dark alleyways, but the physical impact can feel weightless. You slice through four enemies at once and barely feel the edge bite into anything solid, turning critical encounters into rhythm-game button timing instead of gritty blade spacing.
Unreal Engine 5 performance and camera trouble
Unreal Engine 5 provides moody lighting across ruined rooftops and rain-soaked courtyards, but it exacts a toll. Right from boot, the shader compile screen tests your patience, and quick arena turns regularly drop noticeable frames when multiple dust clouds and fire effects kick off simultaneously. In a brawler where deflecting on clean visual tells is the entire point, sudden stutter during an unblockable swing is instant death.
The lock-on camera does not do you any favors in tight indoor spots either. Soul moves fast, enemies leap off pillars, and the targeting reticle likes to snag on background minions instead of the boss mid-lunge. When you fight in open clearings, the flow feels snappy and aggressive. The second you get forced into ruined hallways or multi-target ambushes, the camera loses track of incoming hitboxes entirely.
A ticking clock in a bloated martial world
The premise gives Soul sixty-six days left to live after an assassination frame job leaves him with a mangled heart. That ticking clock pushes you through the Discordance and hidden paths in the Phantom World at a brisk pace. Side routes hide upgrade mechanisms and memory flowers that reward thorough checking, giving the martial setting decent density without feeling like empty map bloat.
Even sitting at number two on the United States Steam charts, the game shows signs of stretching its combat loop too thin across its boss rush. Bosses near the middle stretch lean on hyper-armor and long delay attacks that force you to sit back and fish for standard deflect counters rather than letting you weave aggressive swordplay. It remains a competent action package with massive production values, but purists looking for surgical hitbox clarity will find plenty of visual noise getting in the way.
Comments 3
BestNewestThis review highlights a problem I often encounter with modern action games: flashy animations hide the actual combat feedback. I still have an old wuxia brawler in my library I never finished because of similar camera issues. Adding this to the wishlist, maybe during the winter sale.
Thirty weapons. I'll use two. Camera's drunk indoors. Great, now I have to care about another tragic swordsman.
review says instant stick movement but neutral deflect has input lag on kb/m rn