Soulbringer

Pros • Combat is quite easy • Motion-captured moves look great • Strong control of the cameras • Good music	Cons • Not much audio • Bland graphics • A lot of FedEx missions • Motion-Captured moves slow down the flow of the game • Maps can be way too big, with too little to do
Bottom Line Some nice features, but they're not nearly enough to breathe life into the stale title. The developers of Soulbringer should really be applauded for taking a swing at adding some interesting features to their game. Unfortunately they were only moderately successful at making them work. Ultimately what we’re left with is a very slow, plodding game, with a very worn out premise that we’ve seen more times than most of us care to remember.

We’ve seen the story dozens of times in the past in one incarnation or another. Trouble is a brewing in the kingdom, and a young warrior who just happens to be the descendant of a legendary hero must step up to save the day. Soulbringer is another recipient of this cookie cutter plot. While other games have had interesting twists, excellent characters, or some other well designed facet to help bring a fresh twist to the story, this game is very standard in its approach. It gets tiresome quickly, and will be an all too familiar romp for RPG fans.

But in an attempt to add some interesting game mechanics to the mix that have the potential to help players overlook the less than original story, Soulbringer incorporated a good deal of motion capture into the game. All of the monsters and people have been motion captured. On the one hand, this provides for some very nice combat animation that is really nice to watch. The sword swinging is great, and the way the staff is handled is exceptional. However, this also makes for some very slow movement at key points. When you want to pick up weapons or items with enemies near and you’re in a position where that item on the ground could very well be a crucial lifesaver, prepare to get thumped. When bending down to pick something up the animation is agonizingly slow, all the while enemies are hitting you over the head and blasting you with magic. This is definitely an example of where realistic combat in a game can just make the whole experience a lot less fun. Sure if I were fighting a couple of armored skeletons and a warlock in real life and I went and picked up a +1 mace they wouldn’t hesitated to get in a few free shots, but this is a game, a little bit more fantasy would have been nice. It gets very irritating after a while dealing with the slow animation in Soulbringer.

While the animation is pretty to look at (in all of its slow glory), the graphics themselves are very unattractive. The characters lack detail and their overall design is not at all interesting. One can only take so many skeleton warriors and villagers with a thing for earth tones before this kind of character design gets downright trite. Even the environments are plain, as they lack a real sense of depth or detail, and suffer from wobbly, clipping polygons.

What really turns the game for a loop is how the game’s slow pace and plain environments have been combined to make the experience even more trying. There are some maps that are enormous in Soulbringer, leaving players with the unenviable task of having to trek over seemingly endless stretches of countryside, passing over countless uninteresting environments just to get from point A to point B. Adding insult to injury, there are a slew of FedEx missions in this game. Players will be spending a good deal of their time running through these enormous maps going to pick things up and drop them off.

What could have helped this slow, drawn out game is some more prominent audio. Soulbringer is virtually silent. There are some sound effects, but the music is fleeting. It’s really a shame that there is so little music in the game because what little there is fits the environments very well. There is also some voice acting to try and fill the audio void, which has been performed admirably.

Despite these weak points, combat in the game plays out well. Provided you have your weapon of choice in hand, fighting is hassle-free. It is very easy to target enemies, and launching spells is simple to perform. Better still, it is very easy to control the camera and swing it around when necessary so to get a better view of the action.

Soulbringer takes a nice shot at trying to add some spice to an otherwise very ordinary RPG adventure, but ultimately it just isn’t enough to save this title. It’s far too slow of an experience with a far too familiar story.

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