Hi Devs,
Sharing here my feedback based on the time played in game. Will update this review over time:
BEFORE BUYING
My friends and I had Soulmask on our radar for a long time: it's very ambitious for a survival game, supports up to 10 players and has a clear differentiation via the tribe management system and possibility to embody multiple tribesmen.
BUT Steam reviews are a bit low and flag serious issues with basic execution that are critical for a survival game: UI is overwhelming, there are numerous bugs, balance requires more fine-tuning, and - most important of all - the game didn't chose between PvP and PvE repeating the famous mistake V Rising made recently.
So we eventually bought Soulmask but we deprioritized it against other similar games that are much more polished: Valheim, Palworld, Satisfactory, Raft, Planet Crafter, Subnautica, Green Hell, Abiotic Factor, Icarus, Grounded, etc
The choice to release a DLC before fixing these issues was particularly concerning to us. It's an indication that the ambition of the game far outweights its monetization potential. We would have gladly paid 60$ for Soulmask to get a perfect polish on all its functionalities, given how ambitious the game is it would have been justified for us. This is a weird in-between.
AFTER BUYING - First 5h
First impressions: Reviews were right to be concerned about execution.
- UI is bad. Walls of text everywhere, nothing accessible without a search bar. Key information is hard to read: vitals, name of each crafting station, armour statistics, what each material is, how to get more detail on a tutorial task (F9) etc
- The loading screen is very weird: it lasts 4 minutes on my PC (who costs 4,000$ and runs all modern games on Ultra). Has no music.
- Its unclear whether we're expected to start our first game on Survival or Business mode. The recommended difficulty is not the "Normal" difficulty.
- The game breaks its most important promise: Being able to control any tribesman and automate tasks. a) Our first tribesman, when told to chop trees, got stuck on a large huge tree that we can't cut and eventually tried to cut it... without suceeding, damaging its axe and not chopping any tree.
b) When we noticed tribesmen had better stats than our base character we swapped bodies with them. Our initial character doesn't have the same control options than the tribesmen. It can't serve for automation. So effectively as a group of 3 we have no tribe at all after swapping body. Why this difference between the initial character and the others ? Can we bring initial character on parity with other characters ?
- The game has no minimap, which forces us to open the map every 30s to locate ourselves.
- Stamina regeneration and health regeneration after using a bandage are so incredibly fast that it feels like investing into stamina doesn't make sense.
- Venturing into fog of war doesn't reveal it.
- Feels weird crafting legendary items or epic items on a fresh character in a fairly frequent number of cases. No special perks for these items, just a stat increase.
- Crafting from inventory can be done in parallel with any other action but crafting from a workshop immobilizes the caracter. Leaving the workstation implies using a specific keybind rather than just moving out.
- Very weird resource locking when crafting: resources are locked for at least 1 item in the craft BUT they show as available for the purpose of scheduling the craft of other items. Can't cancel ongoing crafts.
However, there are multiple positives:
- The universe is very enticing because it opens so many areas of progression: masks, technology points, tribe management, base-building, exploration, boss fights etc
- Tribe management has potential to be the most advanced in any game we've ever played via perks, crafting loops and task priority systems.
- Combats feel fine, despite what some reviews say.
- The first section of the map is well designed and well balanced in combats, animals, resources and points of interest.
Overall, the positive make us want to keep playing the game more and get over all the clunkiness to find out about the rest. But I would not recommend Soulmask to anyone that doesn't have very strong experience in survival games. Honestly, Soulmask 3 will have the potential to have Witcher 3 level of success if you guys can learn from your mistakes, assign proper funding to the project and get your basics right. But I don't think you'll get it right ever in Soulmask as you missed the right timing to monetize these fixes appropriately and get market momentum.
Will update once I have more time played.
