Despite the name, Soulstice isn’t trying to be a Soulslike
The new trailer is an action romp much closer to something like Devil May Cry.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
There are so many Soulslike games out there now that it’s easy to conflate third-person action in a gloomy world as a wannabeFromSoftwarefantasy RPG. Based on the name alone, you might assume Soulstice is one of those games, but you can see in the new trailer shown at thePC Gaming Showtoday that it’ll be far from it when it’s out later this year.
Soulstice is a character action game that hews much closer to Devil May Cry than it does to Dark Souls. In a recentcombat video, you can see how main character Briar can juggle enemies in the air and transform her weapon mid-combo. The game isn’t about trading blows with slow attackers; it’s about pummeling your enemies into a pulp, and doing it fast.
The new story trailer focuses on the partnership between Briar and her ghostly sister Lute. The two are linked, but it seems like Briar’s role as a demonic ‘Chimera’ could wrench them apart. Briar’s big armor, big sword, and big eyepatch are obvious nods to Berserk’s iconic hero Guts, but otherwise there’s not much overlap with FromSoftware’s style. The cinematic features her fighting off a ton of grotesque monsters: a glowing golem, a razor-edged wolf, and a floating mangled head demon that looks like you’ll have to take down as bosses in the game.
“Soulstice takes from the Souls games the atmosphere, not the gameplay,” creative director Fabio Pagetti told uslast year. “Combat is completely a hack-and-slash game, not the slow-paced tactical combat that you have in Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I like it a lot, I’m a big fan. But our combat is more similar to Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, and Nier combat. It’s very fast.”
The trailer lines up with Pagetti’s comments. It looks much more fast-paced than the Souls games and much more interested in telling a story about distinct characters versus player-made heroes.
Reply Game Studios plans to release Soulstice on September 20. You can visitthe websiteto register for an early PC demo.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his speciality is in action RPGs and MMOs, he’s driven to cover all sorts of games whether they’re broken, beautiful, or bizarre.
Amazon’s Mass Effect TV show now in ‘active development’ from the writer of F9: The Fast Saga (the one where a car goes to space)
Take-Two CEO says Grand Theft Auto 6 is on track for ‘fall’ next year, GTA 5 has sold over 205 million, and ‘PC will be more and more a part of [our] business going forward’
The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege
