Perfect for playing during meetings that could've been emails

i cant see anything

Its fun, until you get to 5 fps andy level 6 portal. You probably need a 4090 TI and a 6ghz processor and pray to god your house doesn't burn down. 10/10.

This is a game of needs. Like, do I need another 30% area modifier on top of my 180%? Or do I need to understand what's going on the screen? The choice is obvious, and your fps won't like it.

Numbies make brain do the happy chemical. :)

I generally don't like giving negative reviews, but the price-point for the genre vs the experience is just not it. So Soulstone Survivors looks great at first glance. It's got good visuals, seemingly tons of customisation, good controls. So why, then, do I not recommend it? This game is all about the illusion of choice. There are many decisions you can make, but there aren't any particularly meaningful ones. What I mean is - core gameplay boils down to picking a couple of the stronger skills with the most tags in common (say, burst, missile or fire), then running around in circles and praying for good RNG. Stats essentially just boil down to getting a bit of everything for maximum multiplicative value since everything is additive. All the DoTs do the same thing. There is very little interaction involved. There are no truly exciting ways to combine abilities or develop them further and no mechanical levers to play with in a run. What ability functionality you see at at the beginning of the game is what you'll be seeing for the rest of the game. And that blows. For a Survivor game, getting excited about a level up is the bare minimum to meet, and it's missing in this game. Its genre competitors all have interesting levers PLUS other features that make them unique, like branching level ups (Nomad Survivor, Magic Survival), evolutions (VS/Spellstone), gunplay (20 Minutes to Dawn), actually unique character playstyles (Holocure), Artifacts (Rogue: Genesia) and so on. Soulstone Survivors tries to compete using the Skill Tree (which doesn't actually offer choice - you max them all in the end), Characters/Weapons (to determine what abilities are available to you - essentially shoehorning you into builds) and Runes (which are essentially the only real customisation feature you get in the game). It's a lot of variety, but when only one feature gives you any real agency (Runes), there's a problem. This is exacerbated by the fact that outside of ability selection (of which there is an optimal path per character - you just want overlapping tags), there is very little to actually decide in game - you just pick the highest rarity thing that's offered to you, then continue running around in circles. Level Ups and decisions don't transform the way you play, it just increases your numbers. That's incredibly bad/lazy design. Contrast 20 Minutes to Dawn, where every level up has the potential to essentially change the way you play, and the decisions you make when you level count. Then there's the grind. Which is, to be fair, something some people enjoy. But when the runs are essentially mindless + RNG, it just ends up feeling like a 30-min+ chore to get X to unlock Y. Balance is shot and some skills are vastly superior to others, but it's EA, so I understand that's a work in progress. Visual clarity isn't great, but the option to make your own abilities transparent helps. All of this would be somewhat forgiven, and I mean ALL of it, if the game wasn't asking for 4x the price of its honestly superior competitors. But it IS asking for that price, and therefore I cannot in good conscience recommend it when there are better options out there for 25% of the cost or less.

why do i keep buying roguelike games

I had to change the review from positive to negative once I realized that the game actually has zero depth. They have tons of characters, but every single character ends up playing the exact same having the exact same DOT build. You run around avoiding the red circles. Wait for dots to build up and mobs to die. That is the gameplay for every single character in the game. Tons of characters. Zero differences between any of them. Except each character has a unique special thing, but Barbarian is the only one that isn't outright annoying to deal with. And the Death Knight rides a horse and can't dodge. Game is fun for a while until you discover that it's a shallow mess.

Good GPU stress test.

My pc should be titled a survivor too with this many effects happening on my screen at once!

At higher levels, it becomes too heavy RNG related. You can't dodge the immense amount of inane bullshit flying around, and even when you do, some other enemy already targeted all their attacks where you land. It's either that, or getting oneshotted by an attack from offscreen that you had no way of seeing coming. It's fun on the earlier grinds, discovering abilities, but in the late game, if you don't adhere to meta builds, it's no fun. You don't get to play the style you want to play.

Fun at first but shallow in the long run I came to this game as someone who has completed Vampire Survivors 100% as of 1.0 and if you're looking for a game of this type and haven't played that yet, go play that instead. As for Soulstone Survivors I was having fun with the first couple of difficulties but they were a little too easy and once you reach Curse VI, it just becomes completely dependent on RNG. Here's the issues: 1. Leveling system When you level up you get either a new skill or trait (correspond to weapons and items respectively in Vampire Survivors) There's a wide variety of weapons but at higher levels ~80% of them are useless. When weapons are offered to you there's three to choose from and you have a limited number of rerolls per run and if you don't get the right weapons you'll get smoked pretty quickly. Arcane Power, Bladestorm, Chaos Missile, Might, and Bloodlust for example stand head and shoulders above so many other skills that unless you roll well, you might as well restart. Traits follow the same model of being offered three choices per level For traits they fall into a few categories: boosting one of your stats by a static number (health, block, armor), boosting a specific group or a single skill by a percentage additively, or giving your weapons a chance to proc a damage over time property. This means there's no unique progression for each weapon. Each weapon can have a increased cast speed, area, damage, or a chance to cast multiple times but this means that you have to hope to roll good choices otherwise your run is over because you didn't find the trait that gave you enough damage or multicast to continue. 2. Enemies The basic flow of each stage is that you have to kill x number of enemies and then a boss shows up. Rinse and repeat until you've done this 5 times and then you can enter a portal to end the run or enter a different one to continue. There's just a handful of bosses (6 or so I think) so you'll see the same ones over and over which wouldn't be a problem but some of them are very similar to the other ones. The ice guy and the poison guy are basically the same and so is the guardian and the fire guy. The bosses and most elites have the ability to CC you pretty hard so it's not uncommon to have your run ended by being bounced in the air by getting sideswiped by a random elite and then having every boss and elite aim their huge AoE right where you're going to land essentially one shotting you. 3. Difficulty Once you've completed a stage on a certain difficulty you can challenge it on the next tier up to 7 tiers. With each tier the enemies get stronger, have more health, and your healing is reduced (there's practically no healing available already) There's also additional factors like towers which start spawning all over the map which can shoot AoE blasts at you, an invincible ghost that chases you and can kill you instantly, and more bosses spawn whenever you reach the enemies killed threshold. All fine in theory but in practice your run is so dependent on RNG that unless you get near optimal skills and traits you're dead by the time the second set of bosses spawns. Their health pools become massive and their damage is so high that they can easily take off 60-80% of your health in one hit. So you're stuck kiting a deathball of 3 bosses. Unless you can melt them, it takes forever to kill them and before you can do that you've probably already triggered the next wave of bosses. So now you have 5 bosses, 10 towers, a million elites, all with the potential to one shot you if you get bounced the wrong way. If you haven't gotten enough stacks of the movement speed trait, you can't even move out of the way of the constant red circles unless you're spamming dodge as soon as it becomes available. Vampire Survivors operates in ebbs and flows, there's intense moments and moments where there's just fodder on screen. This game is on all the time so there's no breathing room from the hordes of extremely oppressive mechanics. There's something to be said for that but it just gets frustrating extremely quickly.

Red circle simulator 2023

i love dopamine

The gameplay is initially fun, but this is not a roguelite by any stretch. There are simply no important decisions to be made since the correct decision is almost always the rarest upgrade. It's fun for brainlessly killing mobs, but there's no depth to this game.

Things blow up and it makes my brain feel happy

My 9yr old PC can't run this :( :(

Ever wanted Vampire Survivors, but in 3D, with more meta progression, while it still remains a sizable challenge despite all abilities being autocast? Where you go on a genocide spree within minutes, just so you can go into a gulag to do it again? If any of the above, this is your pick. Indie highlight of 2022 for me.

Most of the time I have no idea what is happening on my screen.

THE MUSIC BURNED ITS WAY INTO MY SOUL MY DREAMS ARE FULL OF EPIC DUB-STEP NEVER ENDING GRIND I LOVE IT DASH MCDASHER HERE NICE TO MEET YOU. UN TIS UN TIS UN TIS 9/10

I want to give this a thumbs up but i want to really highlight how bland the enemy variety is when it comes to the different stages you play on. The maps/stages provide little to no variety when compared to any other one you pick. I would love to see at least some new unique enemies that are themed similarly to how the stages are or overall in general would like to see changing stages have more merit besides "This is a snow level" or "this is a dungeon level" (I forgot you have to break rocks on different levels to mine materials to get new weapons and there is character unlocks but in my eyes i feel like there should be more soul added to these levels still whether its adding intractable's, stage specific enemies/spawning/challenges, etc ). I will update this review once the full release is out, however as of now the game is a cool alternative to vampire survivors or next game to play once finished playing vampire survivors. It has a lot more build variety and progression seeing how there is going to be 345 skills by the end of Early Access but suffers in many other aspects like the Soundtrack, stage and enemy variety when compared to the game it got inspired by. First impressions is good despite the issues i have all because of the combat but i hope this isn't the final blueprint for the game and everything added afterwords is just more weapons or more characters as a example, the game needs a little more substance.

Please mommy one more run before going to sleep, it's only 4 AM :( Seriously, I have been waiting for this game for so long now. I played hours and hours to the demo and prologue, and the early access is now here. Curses, talent tree, a lot of characters, so much difficulty at the end, endless mode... And it's just the beginning. The roadmap is actually insane. For this price, hell yeah I recommand this game. This is pure fun. Not kidding here. Devs are doing a great work, and are very active and listening to the community on discord. 10/10 would buy without hesitation.

This game cured my fried dopamine receptors for 3 days (I have a crippling porn addiction)

Highly recommend. Why? In short - graphics, soundtrack, unbelievable amount of variety and replayability. And lastly - clusterfuck. And that might I add is IN ALPHA. Long version: If you are like me, scrolling through games, trying to pick something with an oomph only to fail badly every day - you are in the right place. This game provides hours of fun. Gunfire Reborn was the last game that entertained me this much, and you have to agree, that game is God-tier. Do you like a challenge? I do, Do you learn fast and can dodge everything like you were born for bullet hell games? Add some curses (difficulty changers) and you'll be lucky to find a spot for dodging. You finish a run under 10 minutes? Lucky you, Now go ahead, challenge yourself and finish 5 runs in a row, with each run getting harder and harder. Do you hate being limited by skill level caps and just wish you could upgrade your skills until your NASA PC bursts into flames? Here you go. Increase your skills into such lengths, that they'll cover up half of your screen and you'll get an epileptic seizure, even if you never had epilepsy. Do you love a good banger? This damn soundtrack makes you steal those studio speakers from your job you always wanted, just so you can MacGyver them to your 20 year old amplifier and head-bop while you kill bosses (in-game bosses, don't kill your actual bosses or you won't be able to play this game in prison). Have you ever wondered what it would be like, to stack 200 stacks of poison in a game on an enemy just to be cucked by more limitations? No worries here mate, there's so many enemy debuffs in this game that stack forever and ever, that they'll go off your screen if you try hard enough. Do I recommend this game? Yes. Will I finish it soon? I'll let you know in 200 hours of playtime.

The game is fun at first - once you unlock everything gets really unbalanced and boring. I will explain why I can't recommend this game on the current state. The passive skills do not progress at the same pace as the bosses or even at the same pace as the plain enemies. Armor and Blocking are useless after 30%. I ran some tests trying to get 100% damage reduction - the maximum I got was 70% in the infinite loop level 5. I ended up getting 100+ damage per hit. The main issue is that the enemies gain attack speed, hp and damage that doesn't correlate with my stats. I tried various builds and my outcome was that the alter effects (doom, fire, venom etc) are KEY to deal max damage while running around. Another gap are the curse levels - as some people pointed in the forums and their reviews. Curses are super unbalanced. It doesn't make sense going deeper while using curse level 3+. No matter what you do - you will end up getting killed by 1 hit. Boss mobs are another big issue of the curses (4-5 bosses each time? gl) The environment - is something that grinds my gears. Is so plain, so average, so forgettable... and it also obstructs your runs every single time. You cannot leverage the environment in any way for your advantage - you will get cornered by enemy spammed attacks and get hit. Not even the environment is there to help you. To finish with this review, the unlockeable things: skills, weapons, runes etc are fun at first but completely not needed. This eliminates the roguelike part since every run is basically the same - different visuals, same outcome. Also, the "currency" (crystals and stuff) gets old and useless after 2 hours of gameplay. Overall, is a nice limited game but I have never felt this under-powered in any roguelike game before.