Soulbringer

The Good
At first glance, Soulbringer appears to be a fairly generic action-rpg, but after a few hours of playing, this obscure title turns out to be a surprisingly funny and innovative game. The story is given more room here than in many other action-rpgs and evolves in very much the same way as the plot in an epic fantasy novel would. The developers tries to make the player feel as if they are actually the archetypical “chosen one” and one of the tricks they use is to change the hero's appearance and toughen up his attitude at various parts in the plot to more clearly mark his change from “zero to hero”. The PC will partake in some large battles between opposing forces, repel an invasion and rescue a village of enslaved farmers, to mention a few major events. The world of Rathenna has quite an extensive background-history and you can find and read several books on this subject in-game. You will also get to speak with some interesting non-player characters which have distinct personalities and who are voiced with believability and insight. Overall, the plot in Soulbringer is interesting and engaging and a good author could probably rewrite the base-story into a paperback fantasy-novel.

The real ace in Soulbringer's sleeve, though, is the actual fighting. The combat-system is built so that with each weapon you will be able to execute various moves and more powerful (but generally slower) moves are added to your repertoire as you put more points into your combat-skill. In addition to that you must also take into consideration what type of weapon to use against what enemy (mace + skeleton = crushed skeleton) and even the type of terrain you are standing on since attacks aimed at the head won't hit anything standing below you and vice versa. As you can see the combat-system is quite complex and strategic and it puts Soulbringer one notch above your average button-mashing diablo-clone. The enjoyment of battling Rathenna's various nasties is further helped by the motion captured battle-animations which looks incredibly fluent and realistic. Also, you will get access early on to a special spell called “Death’s Recollection” which allows you to speak with the spirits of certain departed beings. There really is something special to defeating a particularly powerful foe and afterwards interrogate his soul!

The developers also tried something new with the magic system. The idea is that spells are made up of fire, air, earth, water or spirit and coo-exist in a cyclical harmony within the caster's soul and as the strength of one element grows so is the other elements weakened. In practice, this means that if, for example, you were to cast a lot of fire-based spells, they will become more powerful at the expense of the other elements. It's a fresh idea which puts a spin on the concept and adds a layer of strategy.

The Bad
For all the background-history of Rathenna, it's actual world really isn't that detailed and rather limited. There is a “sameness” over all the places you visit, there's hardly any visual difference between the small town of Madrigal and the capital town of the Thardolin empire for instance. Wherever you go there's always black fog obscuring your view so you can never see more than a few feet into the distance and the textures are bland and unvaried. Finding your way in the game can be a major chore and in-game information on where to locate places of interest is vague at best. You really won't have much incentive to go exploring the game-world as there is very little secrets to discover and few optional side-quests to perform. In the end, Soulbringer fails because it feels underdeveloped, the actual game feels to limited to contain it’s promising but nevertheless underdeveloped plot-line. There is several other problems too, such as the clumsy user-interface. Items are sorted into categories but many of them can't be used or equipped via the inventory and instead you have to click on the the category for the desired item in real-time and them flip though that list until you find the desired item. This is made even worse by the PC's poor path-finding which is next to non-existent. If the path you click for the PC to walk on isn't almost completely unobstructed, then the nitwit will often stop dead in his tracks even if there are several skeletons chasing him, doing their best to chop him up.

The Bottom Line
Playing Soulbringer roughly felt like reading Lord of the Rings compressed on a post-it note. There is so many good ideas and so much promise in this title that sadly never reaches it's full potential. It could have been really good, a classic even, if Infogrames had spent some more time on expanding upon the plot-line and streamlining it's interface. Still, Soulbringer has lots to recommend to it and will provide solid entertainment while it lasts.