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.

i wish there was a third option rather than thumbs up or thumbs down, this game is close to being good but it lacks any depth, you start, you grind skills until the game opens up. the problem is the grind is just horrid. you have three starter skills and you need to branch out of them for stat points to grow, every char i make turns into some all rounder amalgamation of every tree. if there was a way to get your three starter skills and play those that would put a worthwhile path into the game but at the moment no matter what type of character you create things end up playing the same because of how the progression loop is. want to play a ranged playstyle? you are forced to melee for stat points to progress. magic playstyle? there are magic skills that if you do not start with you cannot get so guess what, you are going back to melee or ranged to get skills for your magic. my third point is that the tutoring is a slog, you have to pay to raise your skill cap, i would suggest having a option to bring items for tutoring or complete a quest. this game is so close to perfect but its not there YET. wait for a full release.

I wanted to put this into the discussion section but I remember doing so in the past and having been ignored before, (Ref.: Upon release of the vampirism I grinded necromancy (Hell btw, not fun either, the tree also wasted so much potential) only for me to finally get the blood needed. On the way to the altar my char decided the vampire lords blood was more quenching than water, so... there went that. I reported that and nothing. People complained about that half a year later, and it is probably still like this. I also reported alot of bugs and gave other feedback, some including the below which is common in the discussion or used to be when I checked frequently. So, if this is the only way to get the attention of the devs on crucial isses then so be it. I will have this as my honest review for the game and some aspects of it. I have been playing since 0.4 or something, and everytime I want to come back to it it is the same stuff that makes me uninstall and consider leaving a bad review, which I refrained from for so many years. The game itself, like the characters you make has alot of potential they just can't reach because of most siliiest things. It is not impossible, I reached endgame before, however that was before endgame updates. Now I just can't bring myself to play enough to reach that. The game has many issues and with my current frustration I can no longer recommend the game, which is why I won't focus on the many things the game does right but only the bads that need and still can be fixed. The initial skill grind. Many of the skills are just not fun to level. That you get athletic passively is an improvement but with how slow it is and how essential it is in any difficulty on or above the one for the meant experience it is still too tedious, and the cause for a very frustrating character loss What happened was me leveling athletics on a geared char, who I had I played a crafter before who just had enough time and resources to make that gear. Now I lost that gear because a stupid new thunderstorm started when I was getting low. My HP dropped so fast I did not see it and I accidently took a step down off a hill I should not have. Well, guess everything was wasted, along with my time and joy in the game. How about a damn "Dropping down there would kill you?" instead of having me to confirm legendary stick disassemblies? in a game where death matters and you as Dev being like "HUEHUEHUE should have watched you HP before dropping from 1z tile", I hope this example shows how effing upset I am to have wasted another 19h of gameplay to this attempt and I feel like I wasted too much of my lifetime and faith into this game already. You need to know player inventory and equipment is deleted upon player death, unless they changed that in the latest update and I just did not read that, nor did I find my remains, so even more disrespect to grinding for artifacts that could change the world, as one step of a hill shatters everything you hold, wear and believe in into the void. I can live jumping off a hill for hours again because of lacking grind as well as the other boring and tedious grinds I won't go further into but ffs, after all these years there are still posts about how skill trees, the leveling of them and other base grind sucks. Guess why those come up? Because it sucks. Almost every skill I try to level, I cheese because it is not fun after the third run, which I am 290h beyond. Carpentry? Yeah, make and disamble firefood, Adventuring, re-use the firewood fire fires or torches, etc. Despite my resentment within this feedback due to the grinding issues being ignored (GRINDING, Something you force excessively onto the people believing into you every few updates that should be one of the enjoyable part of the game and not the neccessity to step anywhere except grasslands) I am willing to leave one huge improvement tip which you can remove in 1.0. But for early access it would benefit to have a large scaled EXP modifier for proficicenies. Someone has has a potential of 48 in X but is at 3? Give them a multiplayer that becomes less viable the greater the gap bewteen level_current and level_potential. People are less likely to hate your game if they do not lose lose hours or days of grinding (to often test new content btw) because of the dumbest reasons, being forced to do it again IF they have the energy to do so. I have so many hours in this game, left feedback before and never asked of anything but at this point I am done with this game except there will be the following things: - An update related to overhauling leveling. The core system is good and I love the potential idea but everything around it is just tedious and boring in long term for replayability. - Warnings for self-inflicted damage actions that would cause death I think the first will be hard and not easy to fix in one magical update but the second will not only support the the reduction of frustration overall in your game but also help with making a lacking grind more endurable. I hate to be the entitled player that makes demands but this is my review, bringing out the biggest issues with the game and my demands to give it another shot and change my review. I hope I can give this game a positive review in the future but I can not do so if everytime I want to play and try the new stuff, that it is always the same common tediousness and disregard for their players time, patience and engagement. Tl;dr: A part core gameplay is about increasing your proficencies and becoming stronger. The grind is boring, tedious and does not respect the players time the slightest for most of the trees. The funnest trees are those you can cheese in minutes (crafting usally), which is also not really fun. Steam community (Can not talk about discord) feedback has often been ignored, so I doubt there are plans to overhaul things.

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.

Honestly, I want so badly to like this game. I come back to it over and over to only play a few minutes to an hour. The reason? It looks so GD bad. I can play around bugs, I can even deal with some mechanics jank and infrequent graphics issues. I pick up this game and can't get past the weird token things, I'm supposed to want to base build and have a family and lead armies and the item sprites look cooler than my character. I'd probably have days in this game if there was ANY work put into the sprites and art especially character side. This was something the community initially asked for too and I have had this game for years and seen so many questions about it in the discord and steam. It really feels like the dev doesn't just ignore his community, but makes sure to let them know he will never be adding "other peoples" ideas to HIS game while giving the community that really wants to like it the finger.