For: PC, PS5
Rating: ★★½
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL ROBERTSON
Lost Soul Aside is a hack and slash spectacle fighter where you play as Kaser, a member of a resistance group, GLIMMER, who fight against a tyrannical Empire. Shortly after a light bit of civil disobedience, the planet is invaded by an alien race called the Voidrax, so Kaser teams up with another Voidrax called Lord Arena to get the strength to fight back, and go on a quest to reclaim the soul of his younger sister (as one does).
As a hack and slash spectacle fighter, most of the game is focused around combat sections, and the combat itself makes a great first impression. You have a light and heavy attack and can chain them in a very free-form fashion. It’s very fast-paced, flashy and only gets better with the harder bosses and specific skill upgrades; adding new abilities to extend combos together - like a timed press to add some extra damage onto the end of a combo. You can swap between different weapons on the fly, each with their own strengths, though I stuck with the basic sword for most encounters as it seemed the most well rounded.
Arena also blesses Kaser with more abilities, such as the Arena Powers, special attacks which charge over time, and you can fuse with Arena to add extra attacks to your combos. The fusion is something you should do every fight as it’s a lot of damage for something that charges based on the attacks you do, so it loops back into itself nicely. (Too bad I saved it for bosses and didn’t use it frequently until nearly the end of the game because I didn’t realise that.)
Most enemies won’t just sit there and take your combos however, as your attacks do not stun them and they’ll happily follow up with attacks of their own. You can dodge these to gain energy for your own attacks, or perfectly parry to give yourself an opening to follow up. These moves use Stamina, but it seems a little performative as Stamina recharges so quickly you can spam these when you really need to get that dodge.
Similar to the posture mechanic from something like Sekiro, this game has a second bar below the enemies’ health that attacking depletes. Once it’s gone, the enemy stops moving and can be combo-ed easily, especially by your aerial attacks, until they recover their posture. You can also perform a finisher attack which does a significant amount of damage, but fully restores their posture as well as a trade off.
Okay, so I’ve yapped at length about the combat ... because at the end of the day, that’s all the game really has to offer. And even then, I still have some issues with the combat, first off being how boring it got. Enemies are very tanky, even on the normal difficulty, and level ups and power boosts felt like they were having little to no effect. You don’t scale up fast enough to feel like you’re shredding through the enemies; you might perhaps kill one a single hit faster amid having to rack up close to 30 hits to kill them in the first place. This means the fun combat just drags on, which makes the already long levels feel agonisingly extended.
The story, while having a fun premise, is just half-baked. The characters are very shallow, more acting like lore dump outlets than people, and are very inconsistently written, almost as if there are some translation issues. To top it off on the story side, just to make sure that you know the Empire is evil, the first thing you see a guard do is harass and kick a child. It had me rolling my eyes. It’s like it took itself far too seriously when a lighter tone may have worked better.
Audio balancing is also a little weird, with certain things like character voices sometimes being barely above the music and other times being so loud it’s almost deafening, and sometimes missing all together - though that was a blessing as the English voice acting isn’t good, sounding more like a simple line read than actual acting; Kaser is especially bad for this. When he is trying to sound angry, it just comes off as laughable. Arena is probably the best voice actor, if only thanks to the simple fact that I didn’t get tired of hearing his voice, despite the fact that he and Kaser do not stop throwing out lines while fighting or solving puzzles or collecting things. There is not nearly enough variation.to these, so things get grating very quickly.
There’s also a bunch of random performance issues, which were much worse at release. These have mostly been resolved through updates, but you will still need a beefy rig to run this one and actually keep the graphical fidelity of your spectacle fighter intact. Drops still happen to me on certain Arena Power attacks and hilariously, when pausing the game. It temporarily causes everything to hitch and stop for a second before going back to normal and I have no idea why that hasn’t been fixed yet.
It’s a spectacle fighter for a reason though I suppose; everything is secondary to the combat and if you like that, then Lost Soul Aside is perfectly satisfactory. It’s been drastically improved since launch but I’m still hesitant to recommend it. While I do like me some great gameplay, after a while it all felt a little samey, running through corridors and killing the same guys, and only occasionally getting something new to chew on. It’s not bringing anything new, and it’s not doing anything well or better than other games in the genre, so I think you can push this lost soul of a game aside for now.
