[b][u]Gameplay[/u][/b]
Soulstone Survivors is a very generic survivors-like game from the art style right down to the build possibilities. But I'm more compelled to class it as a different genre that is becoming more and more common in 'survivor-likes'.
This is what I call an 'AoE-Hell' game. We started with bullet hell games and bullet heaven/survivor-likes evolved from them. Then here (as with many others in the genre lately), in a half-assed attempt to add back some difficulty to the genre, they devolved the gameplay to a point where essentially, [i]the floor is lava[/i].
[b][u]Graphics[/u][/b]
The graphics are fairly decent, though the art direction is pretty generic and enemy death animations are extremely lacking and visually unsatisfying. Most skill effects have exceptionally well done animations, but unfortunately thier visuals quickly make it impossible to see. You can conveniently increase or lower the opacity of your skill effects mid-game via hotkeys, but many skills are far more visually obstructive than others. So to be able to see past them, 4 or 5 out of your 6 skills must be reduced to the point that they are completely invisible which largely ruins the appeal in this genre.
[b][u]Upgrade/Build Variety[/u][/b]
The game does have an incredible amount of content that makes it well worth the price, but the content within also leaves so much more to be desired in the way of build diversity.
There are [i]hundreds[/i] of skills (attacks) and over 20 characters to choose from, but basically every build comes down to the exact same template; 1 or 2 attacks where the skill's damage is multiplied based on a buff/debuff and the rest of your attacks are purely there to stack those buffs/debuffs. Every single buff and debuff has at least 1 damage multiplying skill that far outperforms any DoT or regular damage build.
Other builds are largely underpowered except for summon builds. While summon builds do not 'entirely' rely on multiplying buffs/debuffs to perform exceptionally well, the summons are terribly unoptimized and will absolutely [i]obliterate[/i] your frame rate.
The level-ups suffer from the rarity system that many other survivor-likes do, where you tend to take the higher rarity skills rather than the ones you'd like to upgrade, eventually resulting in higher total stats across the board, but removing a lot of the agency when leveling up.
There are still some choices to be made, but they tend to come down to how much total % increase to your damage the upgrades will make. With attack frequency, multi-hit and area, you will almost always get more power by choosing lower tier upgrades that effect all of your skills, rather than rarer quality upgrades that target specific skills. While the opposite is true for damage upgrades, you only want to choose the ones that will upgrade your main or secondary damage skills because of the way their damage gets multiplied by buffs/debuffs.
Multi-hit soft caps far too quickly compared to other stats, so it's a lower priority upgrade in general. This also makes one of the runes (which you can only equip so many at a time) a must have, as it increases the curve ceiling.
Most skills don't have critical chance or critical damage upgrades, and critical damage is the superior choice for everything once you have 75% or higher crit chance, since it doesn't have a soft cap and the stat increase is far more than that of regular damage.
So for the most part, the upgrades you will choose are going to be the same for almost every run on every character. The only real difference between characters comes from thier skill trees.
[b][u]Character Variety[/u][/b]
Each character has thier own skill tree and a single unique ability that unlocked at the first node. Some far better than others. Ones that particularly excell are the ones that don't require you to waste time running around picking up multiple energy spawns in order to charge the ability, or having standing still in an energy charging zone while completely vulnerable to the absurd amount of enemy AoEs, the energy to charge the ability simply comes directly from killing enemies.
These abilities, in the end, are the only things in the game that make characters feel [i]slightly[/i] different from one another.
[b][u]End Game Content[/u][/b]
The end game comes with plenty of optional grind. From difficulty tiers to infinite weapon upgrades and material farming, so if you love watching the numbers get higher and higher you will never hit an end to progression.
There are 3 different endless modes; standard endless, overlord and titan hunt (but only the latter 2 reward enough to be worth playing).
[b][u]Overall[/u][/b]
The game is worth the price if you are looking for a new survivor-like, but the only part where it truly stands out is that there is an endless amount of progress to work towards.
