Soul Knight is a dungeon crawler game published by Chinese developer ChillyRoom in early 2017. The game offers either a single or multiplayer experience. Your goal is to complete levels filled with enemies, find better gear and try to get through 15 levels and 3 boss rooms.
Game appearence
The game is designed in a very beautiful pixel style. There also is retro style background music which matches the graphics very well. All characters and enemies are animated and very detailed. Characters also have many skin options to choose from.
Gameplay
As I mainly played the “normal mode” where you need to clear 3 floors with 5 levels each in both singleplayer and coop mode I’ll talk about this part of the game. It also offers other gamemodes with different experiences like a tower defense mode where you construct towers to keep monsters from attacking a central crystal.
Your goal is to get through 3 floors with 5 levels each. These levels include rooms where you need to defeat waves of enemies, chest rooms, where you can find new items or vendors that sell better weapons or consumables and event rooms, where you meet NPCs, different vendors or statues.
At the beginning of your run you can chooses between lots of character that all offer a different starting weapon and abilities. Most of them can be unlocked with ingame currency earned through daily logins or completed runs while some of them need to be purchased with real money. In the lobby you can also visit a garden where you can grow plants that can be used as weapons or are needed as crafting materials. There is also an area to craft weapons or armor and a kind of library where you can see all the gear you have collected throughout all of your runs.
All characters have 3 base stats: Life points, armor points and energy points. These can be upgraded during your run. Characters can be upgraded with jewels which are collected through runs and completing other objectives.
During the run you’ll be able to unlock new perks 3 times per floor. These range from getting a second weapon slot to having projectiles of your gun bounce of the walls. Another similar thing are statues that randomly appear in levels. If you pray to them with a little bit of money, you’ll receive a statue specific buff.
Weapons can be found in chests or bough from Vendors and have different stats. They can either be short range or long range weapons. Using a weapon can cost energy points and will do a certain amount of damage. Some weapons have a chance of hitting a critical hit or missing completely. There are over 400 weapons in the game at the moment and their appearance and effects change a lot. If you want to know more about them check out the Soul Knight Fandom.
At the end of each floor you’ll meet a boss. These can be quite hard to defeat if you aren’t fast enough to dodge the bullet rain some of them produce.
Critic?
The only thing I don’t like about the game is the fact that it’s more or less pay to win as you can speed through the character leveling progress and have access to otherwise unobtainable characters.
Another thing that needs improvement in my opinion is the lack of Google Play Achievements. This would add another reason to complete as many runs as possible.
The multiplayer mode is only accessible if you and your friends are at the same place as the devices connect by being in the same network or hotspot.
Conclusion
Soul Knight: Soul Knight is a fun game to play if you're travelling and need to wait some time. Each run takes roughly 30 to 45min. The game is designed in a beautiful pixel style and offers a new experience every time you start it. – GLPC: emk
