Soulmask
Last updated: 2025-05-10
- Engaging core gameplay loop keeps players invested.
- Challenging, tactical combat demands strategic thinking.
- Beautiful world provides an immersive experience.
- Tribe management system offers depth and control.
- Excessive grind and slow progression frustrate players.
- Repetitive map design lacks inspiration.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 78% · Negative 22%. Score: 22 / 100
Positives:
- The game offers engaging gameplay through exploration, combat, crafting, and base building. Players find the world immersive and rewarding, with a good balance of risk and reward. The game combines elements from well-known survival games, with many mechanics feeling fleshed out and polished.
- The combat system is a highlight, offering tactical and varied options with diverse weapons, skills, and customization. Enemies have resistances and weaknesses, encouraging players to learn different combat styles. The combat is challenging, requiring strategic approaches rather than simple button mashing.
- The game is generally polished, with good graphics, smooth performance, and a well-designed UI. Many reviewers indicate that the game is fun and enjoyable to play. The game is also accessible to new players in the genre, with a well-done tutorial.
- The game features a beautiful and immersive world with diverse biomes, detailed environments, and dynamic weather. The large map encourages exploration and base building in multiple locations. The visual and sound design create a dark but fascinating atmosphere.
- The tribe management system is a major positive, allowing players to recruit, manage, and automate tasks with NPCs. This reduces the grind and downtime, allowing players to focus on exploration, combat, and base upgrades. The AI is competent, making the village feel alive and self-sufficient.
Negatives:
- The game suffers from excessive grind due to slow progression, low material output, and time-consuming crafting. The initial character becomes obsolete, forcing players to switch to NPCs with better stats, further exacerbating the grind. This artificial difficulty and time investment disrespects the player's time and leads to frustration.
- The game is poorly balanced for solo play due to ineffective companion AI and scaling difficulty. Companions get stuck, die easily, and are generally unhelpful in combat, making solo play more challenging and grindy. This makes the game less enjoyable for those who prefer to play alone.
- The map is boring, repetitive, and lacks interesting landmarks, making exploration unrewarding. Tedious resource gathering and limited base building options further detract from the experience. The map feels empty and uninspired, discouraging exploration.
- Character customization is limited, with few options for appearance and a lack of cosmetic variety. The game also lacks decorative options for base building, making it difficult to create visually appealing environments. This limits player expression and immersion.
- Dungeons are repetitive, maze-like, and lack variety in design and enemies. They often force specific weapon choices and offer disappointing rewards, making them a boring and frustrating experience. The confusing layouts and lack of guidance further exacerbate these issues.
Gameplay:
- The game combines survival elements with action-oriented combat. Players can choose from various weapons and combat styles, encouraging strategic thinking against diverse enemies. The combat system emphasizes dodging, blocking, and exploiting enemy weaknesses.
- The game features a large, explorable open world with diverse biomes, dungeons, and secrets. Players have the freedom to explore and progress at their own pace, with optional quests and guides for direction. The world encourages exploration and discovery.
- The game features a complex crafting system with extensive production chains. Players gather resources, refine materials, and craft a wide range of items, tools, weapons, and armor. The crafting system requires time and resource management, but can be automated through tribe management.
- The player controls a mask that can possess different NPCs, each with unique skills and stats. This mechanic allows players to switch between characters, specialize in different tasks, and overcome skill limitations of the starting character. The mask is the player's true identity, and humans are vessels.
- The game offers extensive customization options for difficulty and gameplay settings. Players can adjust XP gain, enemy spawn rates, and other parameters to tailor the experience to their preferences. This allows for both casual and hardcore playstyles.
Performance:
- The game's optimization is inconsistent. Some players report smooth performance even on older systems or low settings, while others experience lag, stuttering, crashes, and other performance issues even on high-end PCs. This suggests optimization may depend heavily on specific hardware configurations or in-game settings.
- Several reviews mention the game suffers from bugs and crashes, with some players experiencing frequent and frustrating lock-ups. While some consider this normal for an early access title, the frequency and severity of these issues detract from the overall experience.
- Many players report lag issues, especially on official servers, during boss fights, or when the server is full. This lag impacts combat and other actions, making the game difficult or impossible to play. Some suggest using private servers with good hardware to mitigate these issues.
- The game features beautiful graphics and excellent sound. The game utilizes Unreal Engine 5, resulting in realistic textures and stylistic visuals.
- Some players have encountered clipping issues where enemies slide or clip through the environment. Other players have reported spawning inside textures. These issues are relatively minor but can still detract from the overall experience.
Recommendations:
- The game's balance is heavily skewed towards multiplayer, making solo play excessively grindy and difficult. Reviewers suggest adjusting server settings or playing on private servers to mitigate this. Some even recommend specific setting adjustments to improve the solo experience.
- Many reviewers recommend the game to fans of the survival genre, especially those who enjoy games like Conan Exiles, Ark, and Valheim. They cite the game's engaging mechanics, world-building, and potential as reasons to try it. Some consider it one of the best survival games available.
- Some reviewers find the game to be excessively grindy and frustrating, especially with the follower system. They feel that the game becomes a chore and question why they are still playing. Some suggest that the PVE content is too short.
- Many reviewers find the game to be a good value for its price, especially considering it is an early access title. They believe it is worth buying, with some even stating it is worth the full price. Some reviewers are impressed with the amount of content available for the price.
- Some reviewers express support for the game as a domestic product, hoping that domestic games will continue to improve. However, some of these reviews show signs of review bombing due to the lack of specific details and the focus on supporting a domestic product rather than providing constructive feedback.
Miscellaneous:
- The game is in early access, with developers actively releasing updates. Some reviewers feel the price is too high for the current state, while others note the game already has a lot of content for an early access title. The game's file size is reasonable.
- The game features a Mesoamerican/Aztec-inspired setting, differentiating it from other survival games. Reviewers draw comparisons to games like Conan Exiles, Ark, and Palworld, but note that Soulmask offers unique elements and a different feel.
- The developers are active and responsive, releasing frequent updates based on community feedback. They are reportedly very active on Discord and take player suggestions seriously, showing a commitment to improving the game.
- This cluster contains general reviewer information, play time, and map completion percentages. These points are too general to be actionable.
- The game revolves around masks that grant superhuman abilities and knowledge to the wearer. Players control a mask that can inhabit different characters, directing them to enact their will and advance their tribe.
