Topic: Hands-on Preview of Young Souls

[riskman64]

A brother-and-sister duo must save the world by beating ‘em up.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/hands-on-preview/48356/hands-on-preview-of-young-souls

Young Souls is a brawler with RPG elements and a unique art style that has both retro with modern appeal. It tells the story of a pair of teenage siblings who discover a sinister threat to our world on the other side of a portal. I had the opportunity to play a short demo of the game during PAX West and came away feeling like I hadn’t quite seen enough. At the very least, the game did pique my interest.

Featuring drop-in/drop-out cooperative play, Young Souls contains a hub world that gives access to a variety of dungeons filled with monsters to beat up on. In the demo, I played through a dungeon with one of the developers and got a good feel for how the game controls. I did find the character movement a little slow and stiff, and the hitboxes or hit detection when swinging my sword at baddies seemed a little off as well. Your character can equip different weapons and armor to augment their fighting style and their stats. There are also magic spells and other skills to help you in combat with individual meters that drain as you use these abilities.

The on-screen presentation of the game is really crisp and clear. The player’s health, stamina, and mana bars are clearly displayed in the top left corner of the screen, and enemy health meters appear above their head. Visually, it looks like you are playing a pixelated-type cartoon, and I think it’s a unique aesthetic that we haven’t really seen much of it, certainly in the brawler genre. Young Souls also makes great use of light and dark in the dungeon areas that I saw, with item pick-ups and magic spells shining brightly against the shadowy backgrounds.

I would like to see more of the narrative, NPCs, and quests that I was told about while playing the demo. I think the combat and movement during dungeons is not enough to sell me on Young Souls, but the announcement trailer and screenshots showing off the game world are giving me a reason to keep the game in mind. We don’t have a solid launch date yet, but hopefully we will see more of the game soon.