Hacking Through Dungeons

Before the official announcement of the next SMT title, if I were asked which game I was expecting to see, Soul Hackers 2 would have been one of the titles furthest from my mind. It’s not because I don’t know of the original as I played the 3DS remake a while back and enjoyed it but rather that the original Soul Hackers very much felt like a one and done game similar to “Strange Journey”.

However, regardless of my expectations, the initial trailer looked interesting enough and I was excited to get another SMT title soon after the excellent SMT V.

A downgrade indeed!

MSRP: $59.99
Platforms: PC, Xbox, PS
Played on PC: i7 9700K, RTX 3080, 32GBs RAM
SteamDeck: Unverified but Playable (some graphical elements missing, may fail to start sometimes)
Length: 40~ hours

Predicting the impending end of the world, Aion, the sentient AI overseeing humanity dispatches agents Ringo and Figue to prevent the apocalypse. As newborn human constructs, Ringo and Figure focus their attention on a handful of key players only to arrive moments after their deaths. Invoking the power of Soul Hacking, Ringo is able to bring them back to life and working alongside her newly resurrected allies, she begins her quest to stop the end of the world.

As far as a premise goes, preventing the end of the world is about as cliché as it gets but what grabbed my attention was the charismatic leader, Ringo. As someone quite literally born into existence the day of the events, her childlike curiosity, brave- bordering on reckless attitude and a whole lot of sass made her immediately likable. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast wasn’t quite as interesting, but they grew on me overtime and it was fun to watch them interact with each other.

It’s just a shame that there isn’t enough time given to character moments as the game’s poor pacing had me jumping from one dungeon to another until the credits rolled with very little room for anything else. I could unlock some “hang out” events with the cast through progress in the story or by locating items/tackling certain side missions but those were not even voiced and felt very throwaway.

Delving into the past traumas of the characters to unlock new skills required going into another set of dungeons as well. All this wouldn’t be that bad if the designs of the dungeons were interesting and fun to navigate but it’s quite the opposite with all the areas looking similar to each other and only a handful even bothering to introduce additional mechanics to spice things up.

Expect to run around and fight. A LOT.

In the dungeon map, I explored the area in third person as the enemies show up on the map and must be touched to start the encounter. There are field skills like reducing enemies that show up if they’re too low level or increasing movement speed that can be activated to help things along but I felt they ran out entirely too quickly and having to reapply them constantly became an absolute chore.

As for the combat itself, it was surprisingly simple and while serviceable, certainly felt like a step back compared to other entries in the series. The main crux is that each of the four party members can equip any demons and are free to switch in battle as long as they have the command resources to do so. When hitting weaknesses, I wasn’t granted a down or an extra turn, I would just end up queueing up to deal some extra damage at the end of the turn via a long animation attack which I ended up skipping 99% of the time.

Fusing demons to create some unstoppable killing machine is still a lot of fun, there’s just not a need for it as the game is pretty easy.

Since everyone can equip any demon, the characters ended up lacking individuality in combat and it’s not until a bunch of unique skills are unlocked that they become more proficient at one thing or another and even then, it could be safely ignored since the normal experience is nowhere near as challenging as other SMT titles.

Not getting extra turns/downing enemies using weaknesses made building specific teams for fights feel less important and I found myself not experimenting with different team compositions nearly as much despite it still being pretty fun to fuse demons since the enemies couldn’t use my weaknesses nearly as well either.

Given how simple the combat felt, I was hoping that it would evolve by adding new interesting mechanics along the way but the combat that was shown to me in the first hour of the game was basically all there was and it did not have the legs to carry the experience for 40 hours.

There are shops to frequent and side missions a plenty but everything led back into going back to a dungeon.

Despite the 40 or so hours of playtime, I felt the vast majority of that time was spent doing side missions, most of which felt like uninteresting filler content. Given how expensive it was to summon demons from the compendium, I was happy to have the additional resources- I just wish they were more interesting to complete.

SMT games are often known for their difficult moral questions that affect the outcome of the story and while there is a “true ending”, there isn’t much in the way of choices to be made during the course of the game which was disappointing.

I feel like I’ve seen this gun skin in another game.

Soul Hackers 2 is a game that compares unfavorably to the recently released SMT V which I consider one of the series best. However, even when viewed on its own merits and nothing else, it falls far short of excellence due to its poor pacing, simplistic combat and endlessly dull dungeon crawling.

Fun Tidbit: At least there’s some really good tracks!

Review copy of game provided by publisher.