Recent reviews by Forest

The best way to describe this game is it's like playing one of those old FMV point and clicks, but you have (mostly) free movement in first person. It plays like Dungeon Keeper, I think the name was, where you have these kinda weird tank controls in first person that cause the turning to be very snappy. Third person mode (unlocked after beating the game) plays about the same, but with the added dynamic of seeing more of your character and her crazed expressions. It's short, sweet, replayable, and has a really cool story.

Gameplay Tip: Make sure to visit the optional locations and see more of the world!

Real World Tip:

Game's great in a lot of ways, absolutely terrible in others. Haven't done NG+ yet in full, but this was a lot of what I wanted out of a sequel while also being lacking in some respects. That's to be expected, but ultimately a lot of the things I don't like could've been avoided. Performance issues are obviously there at the time of writing this, with me being able to run plenty of modern and more intensive games at consistent and good FPS, but somehow this one can't seem to run well unless I go into the registry and force the CPU priority to be as high as possible.

Anyway, Pawn AI definitely feels lacking (more than the first game). Mages and Archers taking too long to wind up attacks and getting way too close to enemies, fighters and thieves just taking too much time to decide to do anything, etc. Not a fan of how many quests require you to wait as well, that was annoying. The post-game was very vague about what to do and was too easy to sequence break it, so that left me needing to look up guide after guide until I found a post on Reddit that gave me the correct answer. Reddit of all places.

For those that also get stuck: you need to go to the Talos marker on your map, let the cutscene play, wait a bit, let another cutscene play, and then the final beacon shows up after you do the other beacons. I didn't know this because the quest where this gets explained didn't show up since I did Scholarly Pursuits and the Battahl evacuation too early.

Not a fan of how many Saurians with super armor showed up late-game. Not a fan of Battahl in general, too much vertical terrain. Not a fan of how easy it is for enemies to stagger you, feels like my knockdown resistance didn't matter even when pumping it as high as possible with augments, skills, and armor. Get the game when it's on sale and only if it's been fixed. Unless you really liked the first game like I did, you are not likely to get much value out of this.

I hate this game, it's friggin' terrible and awful and miserable

10/10, best tactics game ever

This is one of my favorite games from my youth, and honestly holds up to this day. I don't think I can really name another game that is quite like Soul Nomad/Soul Cradle other than maybe X-Com with a ton of mods installed, or maybe X-Com blended with Fire Emblem/Advance Wars.

The basic concept of the gameplay is as you progress through the story, you unlock units you can put into individual squads (or Rooms, as the game calls it), with each squad led by one unit who will be able to provide different bonuses or abilities. You can make any unit a squad leader, and this will allow them to do different things in the map during a battle.

Think of it like Fire Emblem, except instead of just one guy against one guy, it's entire squads duking it out. And outside of individual fights, you can use different abilities to provide buffs or debuffs, AOEs, instant-damage attacks, all sorts of things. You can do a lot with this, and it only gets deeper from there. Each room you have can be equipped with "decor" items that give bonuses or unique effects to their squads, and you can run through RNG dungeons from the squad organization menu to give individual rooms points that can then be used to modify stats of individual units in a room. On top of this, you have multiple other systems in the background, some working off RNG, some not, along with two merchants you buy from at all times. The merchants in question don't upgrade their shop inventories on their own, so you have to fight the merchants, kill them, and then they get replaced immediately with better guys. Rinse and repeat. In towns and cities, you can interact with various townsfolk through the use of "Gig Edicts" (basically this game's equivalent to items). There's a lot of stuff you can do in this game, and in NG+ and onward there's several different bits of content you can experience. The base normal route story is roughly 30+ hours, though your first run could last a while as you organize your squads and run through side content.

There's a lot of things to experience in this game, and I highly recommend anyone at least try it. This game deserves a resurgence, and I'm glad it finally has a proper PC release to encourage that.

Also: if you have any gameplay/mechanics questions, feel free to comment or message me and I'll help you out. I had to learn about a lot of this game's mechanics the hard way as a kid, and still remember a lot (along with learning some new things on my current replay).

Also on topic of the PC port itself: it's pretty much a 1 for 1 port of the PS2 version with some basic options for video settings. Honestly, you don't need much else besides that. It runs very well, looks gorgeous, and has some great spritework and music. Everything looks, feels, and sounds great. This port could've gone so very badly, but I'm glad it works so well.

I JUST WANT A SLEDGEHAMMER, PLEASE GOD JUST ONE

I love my wife... K I C K

Why does this still feel like an early access game?