Soulbringer

aka: R.P.G.
Moby ID: 3095
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Description official descriptions

After the death of your father, you are sent to live with your uncle, Andrus outside the snowy town of Madrigal. Once you arrive at his house, he tells you about magic and his past. You learn of Harbinger, an ancient warrior who sealed the Revenants (demon kings) in the well of souls which are now breaking free and returning to the World. The game is advanced as you are assigned quests, which are recorded in your journal. Not all quests need to be completed in order to finish the game.

Soulbringer is an action RPG. Melee combat consists of detailed moves, which can be chosen by the player: high and low slashes, strikes, etc. The player can create combos with two or more such actions, and execute them. The main character also specializes in magic (including elemental schools), and can fight with weapons and cast spells at the same time.

Spellings

  • Ловец душ - Russian spelling
  • 灵魂使者 - Chinese spelling (Simplified)

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Credits (Windows version)

133 People (109 developers, 24 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 69% (based on 27 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 12 ratings with 5 reviews)

Almost a great game.

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.

Windows · by ratpizza (75) · 2012

RPG-meets-Adventure ... and does it well

The Good
From the moment you start your new game, you are drawn into the deep and engrossing story of a young man with an unknown destiny. Why your character is called "Soulbringer" won't be revealed until you have played almost half-way through - and that'll take quite awhile.

I give highest marks to Soulbringer's sound effects and lovely music. Each location has unique music which changes as new events happen. The most prominent sound effects are for the weather (snow, wind, ice, rain), for which I admit turning the volume down. Sound effects during spellcasting add to the visually stunning graphics of those magical feats. Right up there with the music is the quality of the voice acting. Each character's voice is excellently portrayed with proper influx and tone. All of the voices are appropriate to the person being played (including the main character) and there is very little dialog monotony.

Graphics of the locations (inside and out), NPCs, monsters and scenery are well-done and realistically rendered. At first, your locations are limited to the town of Madrigal and its immediate surroundings. As you explore and talk to others, more locations become available - some only available through magic.

In real-time, battling with weapons is challenging and varied. The game features optional "combo" moves that you assign to each weapon, and these get more intricate as you advance allowing you to dodge and parry during combat. But, you can still fight "manually" without those, which makes it nice. Because battles put wear and tear on all of your equipment, you must constantly get your armor and weapons repaired by the local smithy.

There are about 70 magical spells contained in 13 Books of Magic. Each spell has its basis in an element (fire, wind, water, air and spirit). To a become well-rounded warlock, cast equal numbers of each element to balance your "Seculorem", which is not as easy as it sounds. Supposedly if you are unbalanced, you are more susceptible to damage from spells cast from your undeveloped groups.

You decide where to apply the points achieved with each new level advancement. There are numerous quests to be solved, some revealing themselves as you solve others. And, the game is pretty darned long. After 3 months, I'm still playing it and I think I'm about 80% done. In addition, it plays equally well within Windows XP or Windows 98, even though it was released in 1999.

The Bad
Despite these things, I am enjoying Soulbringer very much.

An in-game travel map would have made travelling around much easier. As it stands, you are given a limited view of your surroundings at any given time - all of the unseen portions dark. As you walk, the area around you opens up and what you leave behind goes dark again. This makes it very difficult to get your bearings at first. The 3D graphics are nice, but adjustments to your angle of view can get you lost quickly.

As is usual for me, latter game foes become more difficult - some too much so - making it stupidly hard to defeat them. Frustration might make you quit altogether ... which occurred to me several times. (But I always went back. Go figure.)

There are too many wide-open, empty spaces in the landscape. Grassy fields with nothing in them, for instance - no monsters, no items to find. Why include so much uninteresting territory? Was it to lengthen the time required to get from place to place? Or was it to give the impression of vast wastelands? Who knows!

Finally, the designers gave us only 5 save-game slots - with no Quick Save or Quick Load! What were they thinking?

The Bottom Line
Soulbringer decently represents a blend of RPG-meets-Adventure. It is much more a Role-Player than an Adventure game, though. "True" Adventure gamers probably won't like it at all. RPGers seeking a simple hack and slash should look elsewhere, because Soulbringer is much more than the normal dungeon crawl. It's intricately woven story and character personality advancements keep you coming back to continue the quests.

Windows · by Jeanne (75956) · 2003

A tedious mediocre implementation of a me-too game design

The Good
The game world and backstory sounded very interesting, and contained enough good and original ideas that if they'd been done well the results would have been a great, perhaps classic, game.

The Bad
The interface was terrible. The combat sequences were neither exciting nor tactical. The player character's personality is fixed by the game designers, leaving no chance to actually role-play. It takes hours of play to unlock each game feature. The graphics were uninteresting. I don't even remember what the sound was like.

The Bottom Line
A waste of time. Not in the abysmal company of Outpost or the ilk, but not worth playing.

Windows · by weregamer (155) · 2003

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

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Similar games? ratpizza (75) Apr 27, 2012

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Sam Tinianow.

Additional contributors: Erwin Bergervoet, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, vinitu vinitunivich.

Game added January 21, 2001. Last modified January 25, 2024.