

So there’s suddenly a magnetic, very enjoyable pull that’s driving you to keep grinding away. In this context, that means being able to attack faster (agility), deal more damage (strength), boost your elemental damage (intelligence), and increase health to last longer in battle (vitality).

When confronted by increasingly powerful monster broods, your only option to defeat them is to get more powerful. Like Pokémon before it, Soul Reaper bewitches you with a false sense of achievement. When you fill out the bar, you’ll be rewarded with stats to spend on the usual suspects: strength, agility, intelligence, and vitality. These souls are far more nondescript and are ultimately just XP fuel. It’s a simple progression system that advances whenever you consume more ‘souls’, the game’s (highly-flexible) main ‘currency’, if you will, but it’s not as specific as Castlevania. This is where you’ll quickly become acquainted with the level-up loop. The party to reunite all reapers gets started in Volcanheim, Soul Reaper’s first explorable world. Turns out the Reaper’s been split into seven (it’s always seven, eh, Voldemort?) variants, each one a fragment that alters the type of elemental damage dealt. After his unceremonious demise at the hands of his archenemy ‘The Herald’, he winds up in a state of limbo where a cast of crazy (albeit very helpful) NPCs familiarise you with controls, navigation, objectives, and so on. What would the destination be without the journey? Soul Reaper’s protagonist, the eponymous ‘Soul Reaper’, looks like Skeletor’s unborn offspring: a bony midget with an oversized scythe and an acerbic sense of humor. That’s standard procedure in RPG-land, of course. While Soul Reaper features a wonderful script and some incredible creativity in monster nomenclature, its main draw is the progress bar. Power Level has done its darnedest to spray copious amounts of pest control, and those efforts have certainly helped to mould Soul Reaper into a more stable form.īut despite these preliminary flaws, Power Level earns much kudos for taking its inspirations- Castlevania, Pokémonand Diablo-and utilising them to create a compelling, original debut title. It’s still wading through Steam’s early access program, which, of course, entitles it to an extra level of leniency should any bugs materialise -and materialise they have.
#SOUL REAPER FREE#
Soul Reaper, an early access game by Canadian team Power Level Studios, has inherited some great RPG genes and is poised to suck up your free hours quite mercilessly -despite lacking the massively multiplayer element. Should you happen to enjoy such time-wasting, I come bearing good news. Lord knows how many precious, real-world months some folks have wiled away in Runescape, LOTROor ESO. Particularly the massively-multiplayer online variety. The role-playing genre is notorious for its addictive potential. ALL GAMES have the capacity to be addictive, but some genres have a more dominant grip by default.
