Soulash 2

Negative review. Boring, repetitive, grindy. "Wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" What you see in the first 5 hours of the game you will see in the next 20. Leveling sucks. Battle skills? Harass your local wildlife until you hit cap. Best case you have some abilities to use, worst case you just walk into wolves / elk / moose for 30 minutes. Crafting? Just get materials and spam until you are out of them. Repeat. And then you hit potential cap and good luck dealing with that. On paper it's pretty easy – go to a trainer in a city and pay them, or get books from POIs. In practice? First you need to find a city that has a trainer with skills you need PLUS of the level higher than you are AND then being able to afford training. And getting books from POIs is RNG dependent. Getting money is boring. Early game it's either doing POIs for scraps, or being smart and mining in the mountains (far faster and somewhat safer). Then you spend that money on potential and making/leveling a settlement. After your settlement is running money becomes somewhat solved, but getting there is a snoozefest. Settlement building is fine, BUT it requires you to build everything. You can't hire someone to build prefab houses, you can't poach a carpenter. YOU need to grind levels and get materials. This is my own gripe so whatever. Crafting mechanically is pretty cool. Also very shallow. VERY RNG heavy. Want cool weapons from POIs? Pray. Want marriage? Go search for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ roses and hope you find them while being involved in EXHILARATING (sarcasm) gameplay of walking forward. Or hope you find the right POI. NPCs are soulless. No personality, no character, just background noise. Dialogue is nonexistent – bare minimum. You could easily swap every city for a menu with a background picture and not only would it lose nothing, the game would be faster to play and less annoying to navigate. I LOVE waiting 10 to 15 seconds while my character walks to the end of the map to leave city every time. Also, you can marry in this game. Two lines of dialogue – "wanna marry? Give thing." You give thing. "Thanks hubby." That's it. No interaction with your spouse ever again. I will look into this game again after 1.0 release and change review if game improves.

cant recommend a game thats in such a sorry state as this to anyone. even the absolute basics like escape bringing up a menu are not functional in this game, crashes constantly, stops following its own rules randomly corrupting your save file and deleting your entire 255 hour world. the base desgn also had little to no thought put into it. its a kingdom building game where you cant build kingdoms, like what kind of logic is that. "in order to continue you must retire and continue as an adult child" "you are unable to have children" absolutely brainless design, even things like war completely break everything. you get invaded and your wife dies? welp thats it you cant get remarried and have more kids so ♥♥♥♥ you deleted world. 0 brain power in the design, absolutely none.

I can really appreciate where this game is trying to go. A sandbox RPG that spans everything from solo rpg adventure all the way up to managing cities, states, economies, and world conquering armies. Considering the level of freedom, to say this is ambitious might be an understatement. I will recommend with a few caveats. Its a solo dev or small team, and it is not finished yet. Certain parts of the mechanics do, in fact, feel quite gamey - for example: You can't tame a creature or recruit additional members to your group until you meet certain arbitrary mechanical requirements. Depending on how you start, these can take quite a long time / grind to unlock. Its similar with some of the settlement management / farming mechanics. Without certain starts, unlocking these take enough time it feels awkward. This is likely for balancing and / or to create a sense of progression, but it quite diminishes the feeling of the sandbox. Likewise, if someone wants a small group of well-rounded adventurers traveling the countryside, it might require time and investment into things that are less relevant to your attempted play style. Feedback to the dev(s) I think I understand why you are doing this, but having another way to unlock such skills would be very appreciated. As it stands, there are really big jumps and long plateaus in progression. Also, it would be nice if there were more dungeon / poi type areas - the ones in the game are good, but these could have more variety, or be be more elaborate. Being able to purchase property and have NPCs approach you to vend at your shops etc would also add to the immersion. Building outposts / camps as a tier below purchasing a tile for settlement creation might also be useful. (Perhaps they might be illegal and thus attacked by local authorities if found out). I know this can sorta be done already, but the step between being a vagabond and having a settlement could use some more options. Banditry against caravans would also be fun. Oh, and please add types of ships. That feels a bit of a gap currently and would add a lot to the game. The ideas seen here have a great deal of potential, and it almost feels like this game is just beginning to scratch the surface. Small range skirmishes, Outposts, Given missions against factions, there is so much that can be done. This really is the bones of what is already a great game and will, in the future, be even better. All in all, I really want to support this game and hope others do the same. There is a lot here, and its worth supporting projects that show this much promise.

This game has a lot of potential, but it's another one of those games that's been in early access for an impossibly long time without a whole lot to show for it. There's also a poor mish-mash of approaches to managing your civilization: 1. "Let your settlers do their own thing" 2. "If you don't stop them from being stupid, they'll screw everything up." 3 "You have to micromanage this stuff here." 4. "But in the most tedious manner." For example. You have "families," whose entire reason for the mechanic in the game, is to be an entity that manages a specific job. But only one family can run a job at once, so if one family runs a bat farm, no one outside the family can work it. That wouldn't be a problem if each family only took on jobs they could manage with their numbers and skill, or listened to your orders. But the issue is that you'll have one tiny family snap up a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of jobs, leaving no other families with a means to make money, while that one family is doing a piss-poor job of managing all those jobs they took because they're all understaffed. So you have to relentlessly check in on every settlement and tediously go through every family and reassign jobs to families that have no jobs available. Oh, but wait, the family may have pushed a bunch of their family members into the army because they had no jobs to work. So you have to either eyeball the last names of everyone and cross reference said last names with families to see if they have enough to take on a job. Oh, but wait, have you memorized how many slots each job has? If not, then you need to assign to a family to see how many slots there are, and then unassign if they don't have enough, because selecting each job tells you NO information about it. Nothing about the number of available workers, not what resources are available, nothing. All that information is located in the BUILD menu. And don't get me started on that mode, and how each job has specific item requirements for the location before you can assign a job to the location. This is a pretty cool feature until you finish building your first settlement and realize the game doesn't have a template option. So you get to build every new chicken farm in every new settlement. I could go on forever, but the bulk of the issues come down to a total lack of scaling on the UI and management as you start to move from an nomad managing a single settlement to a well-known adventurer running a country. When the novelty of micromanaging wears off, no assistance phases itself in to help with the tedious--which just makes you resent the existence of your country. I'll still recommend the game as the concept is good and the potential is there, but I'm wary of putting any faith in the future polishing of this game as its already behaving as a game that's been abandoned.

Extremely shallow and boring game that's hard to learn and easy to master. Although the game repeatedly states that it won't "hold your hand" and that you're free to make your own adventure mechanically there are VERY few options to actually play. This game takes the worst of Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode and CDDA and fuses both, the result is an experience akin to watching paint dry. For example, you technically can start the game as an adventurer and go explore and fight monsters, but the financial return from this is ridiculous when compared to just fishing, hunting or farming. Again, you could also make a crafter, but the way the economy works makes most crafted items worth LESS than their materials. So why bother? You'll need to spend so much time doing menial, repetitive and boring tasks to amass enough money to get anywhere. That wouldn't be such a big problem if money wasn't your main bottleneck earlygame and midgame. This happens because you need gold to increase your maximum skill levels, by training with NPCs. So if you want a decent fighter you'll need mountains of money. But the best way to get this money isn't fighting. In fact, mining and smelting ores will easily give you 10x better returns on your time compared to exploring and looting. The skill system makes combat shallow and boring. There are good ideas mixed in the system, like some skills learned through one weapon's skill tree being usable with other weapons and passives almost always applying. But theese cases are rare. Most of the times you're just mashing the same buttons. It would be very interesting if the limitation imposed by skill potential could be mitigated by interactions between different skills, especially non-combat skills. This would make the grind to make money more rewarding. The final issue is that the game is just confusing. The systems behind it are simple but made complex by obscured information. Once you get that information it is very easy to manipulate those systems, but getting that info means either reading a bunch of guides or playing for hours on end. Why? Because there's no "hand holding" to give the player "freedom to make his own adventure". But after learning a little about the game all your adventures will look the same: grind money early, use this money to raise skill pontential, grind easy mobs for skill levels, grind more money to make a settlement and use this settlement to grind even MORE money to grind MORE levels. There are no quests or objectives apart from conquering the world and all systems guide you to that. You can't be the best smith of the land because that barely makes money, you can't be a solo killing machine because the game is balanced around the idea of companions. You can only grind money to conquer the world and that's it .

A mile wide but an inch deep. Early game doesn't change once you understand how the game plays so it turns into doing the same "grind" to get skills up to a level that they are useful. You could be a merchant smith etc, and make some money but all crafted items are sold for 35% of the listed item price that could be higher based on stats etc but you can make more money by just selling the raw parts to them unless its ingots?. Being a thief doesn't pay well at all unless I missed something over all your better of mining in the mountains for rare ore. Outside of that you go to a POI to kill stuff to get magical items to slap onto your armor and weapons to go to do harder POI's. I will point out that I did not touch any of the town/war management so maybe that's deeper then the rest of the game. CDDA (and it forks) and DF AM are free and have better non-repetitive early game. But they have been around much longer than this game.

I started liking it, until my elf-tree home city got misteriously cut in half (seemed a bug, but if it wasn't, nobody was commenting about an attack that destroyed part of the tree). Ok, let's start a new game... I start in an elf-city again, and as soon as I get my nose out, 3 mush-guys mug me. I run back to the city, hoping the local guards would help a fellow elf... no, nobody helped. And the fiends wouldn't attack anyone else but me. And killed me in the very city center pond, in front of many bystanders. Quite the immersion breaker. So... no, can't like this game, when it promises a story and delivers an arbitrary nightmare.

A very interesting game. Fun to play around with. Needs a lot of English editing. Has some very sophisticated systems for an indie game of its kind, the sorts of things you can play around with for a long, long time over many different characters. I think it could use some reworking, but none of the following is fatal to the experience by any means, and all proposed changes are just my opinion as someone who has played the game to death and really enjoyed it: -The races could use some more variety as far as natural bonuses go. I've never found a good reason to play anything but a human or an elf; the special vision passive that a lot of races have is just bad in my opinion because sight distance for non-Intelligence-heavy characters is already so limited that it's just too inconvenient to play a dwarf or a troll even though they seem appealing. Other races like the cats and the mushrooms I just feel nothing about. -Aging comes about for non-elf, non-dwarf races a little fast if you do a lot of traveling. It's like 30% too fast for my taste, and noticeably constrains gameplay. -The marriage system could use some quality of life updates, like having NPCs not INSTANTLY marry eligible other NPCs. In current builds, unless you get lucky, you can easily have to resort to murder to "create" an eligible spouse for yourself, and you might have to do it many times as widows/widowers instantly remarry the same day their previous spouse died, creating a loop where you have to execute the bachelor population of an entire town just to be able to marry anyone. Seems reasonable to make NPC marriage more of a periodic dice roll so the player can get a foot in the door. Although I like a lot of aspects of the skill system, and I love the breadth and depth of all the different skills, I think skill points are a little too tight to make most characters feel like they've really reached their potential. You can only max out a few skills, and some of the biggest reasons to do some of the skills at all only appear at the final levels (certain really good crafts, alchemy's final skill, Thievery's "anything-can-crit" ability modifier, etc). If you make a character thinking "This will be a blacksmith who makes great gear" and you're trying to decide what to focus on, you'll probably conclude that you need at minimum to have Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing. But pretty much all smelting comes from Adventuring. And some of the most useful metals come from Alchemy recipes. You really won't be able to make GREAT gear without access to stuff that comes from the Imbuing skill. And you won't be able to make great use of any weapons you make since you will be just a crafter, not a fighter. This is clearly intended design. You can make the best weapon and armor in the game, which you yourself can't use well, and stash it for a later character to use. That's very neat. Still, it feels like only having three maxed skills is just not enough for any playstyle. Many skill trees give you ability modifiers that unlock really cool synergies, like changing the elemental damage type of attack skills, adding status effects, etc., and it always sucks how few of those synergies the average character can make use of without becoming totally unable to reach crucial specialized milestones like the ability to craft skill books. It makes you choose between having fun now and having fun on subsequent characters, and I think it could be relaxed a bit. It would be fine to let characters cap four, five, or even six skill trees before even considering old age potential. It wouldn't change how cool it is to be able to leave skill tomes and endgame gear for subsequent generations of characters.

Bought this game because it looked like something I would enjoy. I like similar games. Unfortunately I was unaware of the marriage controversy. If I had known, I would never have spent my money. Not interested in supporting this developer.

stupid big rat ended 30 hour save