Death, Soul & Robots came with a decent dollop of nostalgia. The cat main character, the slightly wonky pixel art that never quite comes together, and the level layouts all reminded us of Bubsy the Bobcat, and cursing our SEGA Megadrive as we died over and over again. They’re not necessarily our fondest memories, but there’s definitely some Bubsy in Death, Soul & Robots.
Modernising things slightly is a dash of Metroidvania. The world of Death, Soul & Robots (presumably a play on the Netflix show Love, Death & Robots) is a reasonably large and open 2D space, where progress is blocked by a lack of abilities. Helpful signposts prompt you to find a specific gun or power before you can pass them, and much of the adventure is knowing where the hell to go.
You start in this world, a robot cat determined to find the Soul of the World (narrative, and the game’s interest in its own narrative, isn’t it’s strong point) with only a gun and a single-jump. Luckily, a Shaman offers the first of many quests, and that quest will stick with you for most of the playtime: construct a compass to find the Soul.
So, off you hop, exploring in different directions to find out where you can go now, and where you’ll be going later. Death, Soul & Robots isn’t particularly interested in offering a helping hand, and often that’s a boon. Other times it’s not.
The gun you’re given is an odd old bean. It doesn’t feel powerful at all, offering a tiny ‘pew-pew’ that lacks impact. But it one-hits plenty of the game’s enemies, and the collision detection is so odd that you can miss an enemy by yards and still hit it. So, in actuality, it’s a beefy little handgun.
It gets upgraded quickly. Soon, you will be strutting around with a railgun (great for creating platforms), katanas (ammoless, but almost impossible to notch a kill without hurting yourself) and the mighty grenade launcher, plus more. Frustratingly, the better guns require ammo, and they run out reasonably quickly. Good luck if there’s a gun you need to progress and you are without ammo. Death, Soul & Robots doesn’t have an adequate answer for what you do in those situations.
The guns are also useful for bosses, with a handful appearing over the runtime. They are a varied bunch, with a moray eel crashing through the level being a highlight, while others are so one-note that you question whether they are bosses at all. An armadillo had us firing continuously at it, as it barely even moved, and we wondered what the designers really wanted us to do.
Combat isn’t really the focus though. That’s on exploration, and using the platforms and portals in the levels to find a way to progress. It’s the old pattern of gaining a new power, and racking your brains for where you needed it.
In one sense, Death, Soul & Robots is quite handy at this stuff. It leans heavily on a mechanic where you find and destroy crystals, and those crystals will then activate portals. Nudging back the boundaries of the known game is handled well, and it can feel great to finally get the invincibility power that lets you walk over spikes, and other killer apps.
But Death, Soul & Robots is also terrible at offering you enough tools to deal with its world. There’s no map, for starters, which can be a problem when some levels are labyrinths. We emerged out of portals and had no flipping idea where we were. It could be a new area or an old one and we’d be none the wiser. A map in a Metroidvania feels like it’s essential, and the lack of one is a big miss.
There are no teleports either, not in the map-spanning sense. Death, Soul & Robots loves to send you from region to region to unlock doors and hand in quests, but that’s no small order. You have to amble back and forth, and that takes minutes that you’ll never get back. It’s constant, and there’s certainly no reward for all the backtracking. You’re not collecting anything like XP or coins, so there is literally no benefit to all the backtracking.
Quests vaguely hint at what you need to do, wafting a hand at a potion or lost family member. We were never one-hundred percent sure of what we’d need to do and where we’d need to go, which means some educated guesswork. But when there are no portals to make returning easy, it feels incredibly frustrating when your guess is wrong and you have to sulkily come home.
We can shut our eyes and imagine a version of Death, Soul & Robots that has a map, portals, better instruction of where to go and some XP unlocks to make the combat worth it. We can virtually touch it. And that game would be much, much better: a vast map of interlocking regions, bosses and unlocks. It really would be rather good.
What we have instead is a decent Metroidvania that doesn’t offer any of the basic amenities that a Metroidvania should offer. It’s like being shoved in a maze, excited at the prospect of solving it, but someone slaps a blindfold on your face and ties your shoelaces together. Suddenly, the maze isn’t as fun as it first seemed.
Hidden away in Death, Soul & Robots is a quality Metroidvania, but it keeps punching you in the face when you get close to it.
Source: https://www.thexboxhub.com/death-soul-robots-review/
