Game:

Soulbind: Tales Of The Underworld (2023)

Category:

Review

Duration: 27:44

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6

Soulbind Tales Of The Underworld is an Indie, Hack and Slash, Action Roguelike, a 2D Sidescroller Platformer with Procedural Generation; it’s good.

More Than A Bag Of Bones!
In Soulbind, you’re a skeleton, raised or returned by some dark force, but you don’t have to stay just a bag of bones!
In the random lvls, you can find altars, where you can lvl up; picking a lvl up ability from the ability tree, fun, but you can do far more than that here.
At these dark altars, you can reforge yourself, literally grafting new body parts on; gradually changing your undead look, and unlocking new powers in the process.
And what do you do with the discarded bit you ask?
You eat em! Of Course!
Yep! You eat body parts to regain health; dark!
But, you can only eat at the altars; this undead is fastidious!🍴

And when you die, and you very likely will die, you respawn at the beginning, both keeping your lvls, and your equiped body parts, but not the stuff in your inventory; very fair and generous.
So, a bit of Meta Progression is present in this form of retained character lvl and bits; nice.

Combat and Movement:
In Soulbind, you have a fast melee attack, and the more powerful abilities you unlock are cooldown based, for example, there is a 2 second cooldown on the first “Quick Stick” melee ability you get, which hits very hard, and is very worth using!
The combat in Soulbind is very Hack and Slash, but mobility focused as well, as you can dodge roll through your enemies with only a 1 second cooldown, and you can jump around as much as you like, as the dead are not limited by such mortal concepts as stamina!
And you can air dash by default, helping you clear quite a bit of area in the air.
On top of that, you get a Double jump almost immediately; granting a great deal of damage mitigation by simply moving and not being where the enemies are attacking. So Smart!
In Soulbind, all this movement is good, and helps keep the combat dynamic and interesting, as there is no bump damage here!

No Bump Damage Here!
In Soulbind, there is No Bump Damage; enemies have to make an attack to hurt you; good!
This means combat both looks and feels better, and enemies can have more personality, having to deliver their damage through some animation, not just walking into you and somehow hurting you with all their evilness!
Here, you’re evil too (or at least wrapped in evil-ness), so that trick won’t work here!
Stand and deliver undead scum!⚔️
Additionally, walking past / through enemies is done at what feels like a 75% speed reduction, this is very good ,as it simulates you trying to evade while getting around them nicely.

Controller support is present, and good, and Mouse and keyboard controls are present as well; though as a 2D Sidescroller, I found Soulbind feels much better with the gamepad.

Note: This is an early look at the demo for Soulbind Tales Of The Underworld so any bugs or other oddness is not representative of the final product.
Still, Soulbind Tales Of The Underworld is a very pickup and play Hack and Slash Action Roguelike, a fun 2D Sidescrolling light Platformer plus Procedural Generation that is easily worth a wishlist and a watch.
Watch?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2468470/Soulbind_Tales_Of_The_Underworld/
#Soulbind #ActionRoguelike #HackandSlash