“Making it through one of the more difficult rooms without using a single health potion not only makes the rest of your journey simpler, but it also makes you feel pretty badass.”
– Josiah Renaudin from Reaction Time in his review of Soulcaster I & II
It’s been forever since I’ve compiled the reviews, interviews, and mentions from around the interwebs relating to Soulcaster II. Let’s get this party started!
Fire up Google Translate for Interview – Ian Stocker, créateur de Soulcaster II from French-language games website GameSideStory. Also from this fantastic website is a very comprehensive review.
Steven Hurdle at Writings of Mass Deduction checked out my game for day 173 of his 1-XBLIG-per-day stetch. Bottom line? “Easy to recommend.” Thanks Steven!
Over at XBLAFans we’ve got James Heiger’s review where the game has made a very positive impression for its music, nostalgia factor, and unique game play. He makes a valid request for a scoring and ranking system, something I will be looking into for SCIII.
Check out the in-depth coverage I got at Game Interface. Derek Strickland explains the game mechanics and features in detail, and the game gets a 9/10. Groovy.
Nick Marroni posts Underground Kings: The 25 Best Xbox Live Indie Games and Soulcaster (the original this time, not the sequel) gets the #8 spot!
Brainlazy features an article by Decoychunk on the Winter Uprising titles, and gives Soulcaster II a respectable 8/10.
Jonathan Lester features Soulcaster II (along with RadianGames Crossfire and Ska Studios ZP2KX) in its Indie Game of the Week segment. High praise: “There’s nothing quite like it … Highly recommended.”
GameDebateClub offers coverage and they seem to like it pretty well–though not huge fans of the visuals, the found the gameplay enough to overcome that and were compelled to play the whole 2.5 hours.
Do you like top lists? We like top lists…
SFX-360 places the 2-part series at the #2 slot (behind Robert Boyd’s excellent Breath of Death VII) for Top 10 Xbox Live Indie Games of 2010.
Matt Miller lists us as one of the Five Xbox Live Indie Games for the New Year.
And we land in the #8 slot on XBLIGR’s Top 20 Best Xbox Live Indie Games of 2010.
In case you don’t have the February 2011 issue, here’s a link to the digital version.
Thanks Mike Rose for picking my game! And thanks to Liam Burke for finding this link.
Special thanks to @gaspode_t for scanning and posting this page from what I think is the March issue of Famitsu 360. This is such a huge honor because the original inspiration for a lot of the look and feel of SC came from the Japanese RPG’s and adventure games I grew up with on the NES and SNES.
I invoked the Japanese language skills of comrade McCawley again, who offers this translation:
“The 2nd installment of this action RPG, where you summon forth warriors and archers to fight for you, has just been released. The 8-bit style visuals are retained, but the overall graphics quality has been improved. Throw in the extremely atmospheric BGM, and the whole game feels more polished than its predecessor. What’s particularly notable about this game is that the difficulty has really increased. The monster spawn timing on the generators has made clearing the game a severe challenge. If you aren’t able to place your summons in optimal positions quickly, your hero will be overwhelmed.”
[screenshots captions:]
“Everything’s improved in part 2. The level of visual detail has been enhanced, without detracting from the first game’s atmosphere”
“You need to deploy summons quickly and effectively in order to shield your character. Wasting time isn’t an option. Speed is everything.”
The text is too blurry for me to fully make out on that first screenshot, but what I can see says something about difficulty, and “there’s no room for inefficiency”.
