Soulstice drops two warriors bound as one into a sacred city torn open by a rift, and asks for a very specific kind of cooperation. Briar wields the blades; Lute, her shade companion, projects the fields that decide which foes can be touched at all. The result is a character-action game in the Devil May Cry mould, dressed in dark-fantasy trappings borrowed more from half-corrupted warrior sisters and berserk transformations than from any shooter lineage. Its best trick is refusing to settle: new mechanics and enemy types keep arriving for nearly the entire campaign, so encounters never calcify into a single repeated loop.
That dual-character structure is the whole engine. Lute’s evocation field exposes ethereal foes that Briar cannot otherwise harm, while banishment strips crystals and possessed enemies of their protection; juggling both in the middle of a combo gives combat a rhythm no single-protagonist brawler matches. Counters layer on top, and unity built between the sisters feeds synergy attacks that clear crowds, while Rapture transformations grant berserk bursts with elongated limbs that suit the source material’s visual language. When a boss can be denied its reinforcements outright, the design clicks hardest: preventing an enemy from summoning anything at all is a power fantasy most games of this type never hand over.
The weapon roster spans an axe, whip, daggers, gauntlet, cannons and the heavy Ashen Enforcer sword, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses, and switching between them on the fly keeps combos malleable. Enemy design earns equal credit: incense burners, obelisks and regenerating sprouts seed the arenas, and wraith and possessed mechanics force constant field-switching. Very few campaigns sustain this much invention for this long; even the enemy pipeline, the first thing to typically stall, only quieted down late.
Transcendence, the late-game super-state, is the one system that undercuts itself. Reaching it demands far more build-up than the regular Rapture transformations, yet Rapture returns healing and proves more beneficial in practice, so the flashier form gathers dust. Progression otherwise flows through Tear Shops, buying skills for Briar and traits for Lute; the trickery alignment, with passive healing and healing on hit, quickly establishes itself as the practical choice. Some chapters drag on, but the campaign never overstays its welcome.
Ilden itself gives the campaign its identity. Keepers, veils and wraiths populate a city rendered in a look halfway between realistic and cell-shaded, and the Claymore-flavoured narrative leans into tragic origins and memory-warping villains without ever tipping into parody. The story’s revelations land with genuine weight, and the identity of the game, half-human warriors with corrupted halves and a shade whose fields gate every exchange, separates it from its genre peers. The story’s revelations land with genuine weight, and the finale’s set-up for further instalments feels earned rather than tacked on, introducing figures modelled with evident intent.
Not everything lands. Lock-on snaps to distant, irrelevant enemies and makes crowded encounters a pain; the camera zips onto whatever target it fancies. Optional challenge arenas demand tight synergy combos at exactly the moment the synergy attack’s awkward trigger becomes tiring, and enthusiasm for them evaporates early. Stability wobbles too: a fatal-error crash interrupts play with no explanation, and loading screens slice levels into cutscene-fight-cutscene chunks mid-scene. Chromatic aberration during dialogue strains the eyes more than it flatters the image.
Overall, this is a confident, inventive character-action campaign whose dual-field combat, relentless variety and dark-fantasy conviction outweigh janky targeting, a forgettable side mode and the occasional crash. Judge it on its own rhythm and it earns its recommendation.
