A button prompt appears when enemies are about to attack, and a quick press sees her intervene. In effect, Lute does your blocking and parrying. Briar's transcended conditions rarely become available unless you perform near flawlessly in combat, and the systems built around Lute make such feats less likely. While this sounds neat in a tooltip, however, it becomes claggy and caustic in the hands. In what is often a disorderly and aggressively tepid experience, at no point does it attain the level of imagination, depth, refinement, or sheer style of its greatest influence. And as in PlatinumGames' title, this opening isn't a tutorial so much as a warm up, an opportunity to hammer buttons and see what your avatar has in her locker, showcasing her dynamism before a more measured first level.īy aligning itself so firmly with the queen of arse kicking, though, Soulstice gives itself a heck of a lot to live up to – and it then struggles in vain over the next dozen or so hours to escape the shadow it so deliberately invoked. A prologue sequence sees Briar and her ghostly sister Lute plummeting through the air on hunks of broken masonry, fighting demonic creatures that teleport in all around. In particular, developer Reply Studios must be big fans of Bayonetta.

Soulstice game