SOUL KNIGHT review

(Reviewed by Melody Werner)
Soul Knight is a free to play mobile rogue-lite top-down shooter developed by ChillyRoom. A popular release with over 10 million installs and a very positive reception. I recently decided to give it a bash. After having played a good amount of it, I think it's an admirable effort but it falls flat in quite a few areas.

Presentation wise, Soul Knight is nearly superb. The pixel art is great and the characters are well animated. The character designs are basic and uninspired, but the aesthetic holds them together. The music is brilliant, but with some caveats which I'll go into later. The weapon sounds are okay, but can err on the repetitive side.

Soul Knight's narrative is practically nonexistent, as this is a very mechanically focused game in every respect. Where the game falters is its over-reliance on randomness. With something like Binding of Isaac, there is a guarantee that each floor will have things like an item room, a store, etc.. Soul Knight does not have any of those reliable rooms which you know are on each floor, so the chance of you getting screwed by bad luck is multiplied. In BoI you could still get screwed over by keys not dropping, having a bad start, resource mismanagement, or getting a bad item drop without a reroll item. In Soul Knight it is entirely likely for no chest room to spawn, for chests you do get to only give you coins and mana, for the chest to actually be a mimic which will probably kill you if you're not well equipped, for stores to not be on a floor, for you to not get enough coins to drop for you to buy a weapon you need. This is further multiplied by how broken the bosses are. You need a good weapon against the first boss to nuke them down before you get wiped. In Binding there were gear-check bosses no doubt, but many you could defeat with sheer skill until you would eventually get a good drop. Bosses like Goblin Priest can carpet bomb you and fill the screen with lasers, making it almost impossible not to die. Then there are the between floor upgrades, which vary from game winning to 100% useless depending on whatever weapon(s) you happen to pick up. And it's all up to random bullshit.

Playing the game itself is only as satisfying as the weapons you get. If you get some badass melee weapon or whatever, it's brilliant fun. And at first, it's a lovely romp. Until you get screwed over so much and get stuck with boring weapons so many times. Character traversal speeds are cumbersome and make the game way less fun. As you slowly meander from one side of the map to the other countless times hoping to find a good drop, the slow traversal speeds ruin the pacing completely. Not to mention the game's songs aren't always long enough to last until you leave a floor, so when they run out you have ghastly silence until you reach the end portal. Some rooms have speed pads which make traversal much more entertaining, but they are relatively rare in my experience and aren't very consistent. You'll definitely see these pads but they are so randomly placed and thinly spread, you're lucky if you can get a few rooms with them on a floor.

As enjoyable as Soul Knight can be, it's weighed down by so many monotonous or undeniably bullshit moments. If you want a good enough rogue-lite for mobile, then you will definitely love it. For me though, I've had my fill. Soul Knight gets a 7/10.

Decent

Summary:
Despite its overly random nature and slow movement speed, Soul Knight is a fine enough game with a lot to be enjoyed if you can tolerate the random nonsense.