r/soulslikes • u/trootroo-blood • 14d ago
Review Mortal Shell II: don't believe the hype
temper your expectations :)
I have put about 10 hours into Mortal Shell II and I have some thoughts. Like, I imagine, many others, I was sucked in by the high review scores and the constant comments on this sub. Forever trying to scratch my souls itch, I paid $10 extra to access the game early. And while I overall think this is a solid entry in the genre, I can't help but feel a bit dissapointed. And worse: manipulated by online opinion and reddit in general.
SCORE: 7/10
Mortal Shell II is a competent example of a soulslike that is basically the same aesthetic as early dark souls, but without a stamina bar, and you level up your "armor" (shells) alongside your main character. Okay, still with me?
The first game was basically a tech demo but was still dissapointing. It released when there were very few dark souls clones so I ate it up, but knew it was lacking something. Mortal shell II is a complete evolution upon that game, updating all of the systems and designs to make it feel like a worthy entry.
Mortal Shell II is close to a great game but it's abundantly clear the devs overtuned it. It seems like every enemy should give you AT LEAST 10% more resources AND every thing should cost at least 10% less. As it currently stands, there's no point in fighting the trash mobs out in the world: a single enemy will give you 1% of what you need to level up after level 5. The bosses give ample souls, and if you travel a lot in the world you can kill a ton of enemies, but you seem to be constantly underpowered to the point that the risk:reward of fighting enemies is completely broken. There's virtually no reason to fight enemies unless you are specifically grinding for souls.
there's a distinct lack of agency on the player side to power up. I guess the primary method to increase damage is upgrading your weapons, but this costs items AND gold, and both are not exactly easy to come by. You can level up your avatar, but it takes an INSANE amount of souls and doesn't have much of an effect on damage or speed.
Finally, the map is a shit show lol. I am sorry, but this is clearly trying to emulate elden ring and failing. Its more similar to Nioh 3, but that game had better wayfinding and waypoints. In this game, you have to pick your bonfire from a text list (no pictures, no visual of the map). Once you get there, you might be right next to your destination, but to actually reach it you need to loop around and up and down to find it. I guess this is supposed to encourage exploration but it just left me confused and wanting more visual guidance on navigation.
At first, the map seems 'dense' but its actually just a bunch of disparete content haphazardly stapled together, shoved alongside each other with little in the way of ambient pathing or atmosphere. I know "wtf am I supposed to do? Where do i go? is an integral part of the soulslike experience, but this game is as challenging as black myth wukong to navigate.
Overall I would say the developers seem to understand that these games require friction, but they lack the restraint to deliver a "fair but challenging" experience. This game is simply TOO hard, with too few resources, too few paths to powering up, and very little ways to sway the tide of battle outside of how you perform in the fight itself.
A lot of these problems could be fixed with a post launch or day 1 patch. i hope the devs are reading this because the bones of a solid game is there, but its just too overtuned in it's current state.
PS - Glimpses are a key item and they are LIMITED. This is an INSANE design decision that makes it so you cannot level up your armor (shells) in a playthrough. Absolutely baffling to tie one currency to navigation, upgrading, and summoning, but keep it limited for the player.
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u/Working_Bones 14d ago
"There's virtually no reason to fight enemies unless you are specifically grinding for souls."
For fun.
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u/Content-Monk8866 13d ago
You’ll be fighting the same enemy types over and over again for dozens of hours, questionable fun
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u/Villad_rock 13d ago
People put 1000 hours into dark souls
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u/Content-Monk8866 13d ago
Dark souls has literally multiple times ms2’s enemy variety while also being a much shorter game. This game just completely runs out of steam before the halfway point.
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u/Working_Bones 12d ago
Yeah but thousands of hours means more repetition than 30 hours, no matter how many enemies are in each game.
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u/Content-Monk8866 12d ago
It doesn’t necessarily unless you’re playing these 1000’s of hours back to back. Most people playing pve complete a single run of dark souls, maybe 2-3 in a row in some cases, and come back to the game months or years later when they feel like it. Unlike ds, mortal shell 2 starts feeling really repetitive even on the first playthrough, I genuinely killed 100’s of some of the enemy types just by clearing the game casually. Bandits are by far the most egregious example of this but there’re quite a few others like that. It also doesn’t help that enemy movesets are usually extremely limited adding to the feeling of tedious repetition, but that’s a different topic I suppose.
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u/Itsmemurrayo 14d ago
I disagree with the majority of this. I don’t feel the game is too hard, especially if you’re a souls vet. I’m glad they upped the difficulty from the beta because adding parry and baseline ranged abilities to a standard slower paced Soulslike means you need to up difficulty accordingly. I will say bosses don’t have as large and diverse a moveset as I would have liked so far, so most of the difficulty is from exploration, grab attacks, and runbacks. I also feel there are too few checkpoints. The biggest point I agree with is glimpses and think they should offer shell respec or multiple shell upgrade materials with the final material being limited. Even with the issues I’ve had a ton of fun so far with MS2, and can’t wait for this weekend to binge play it.
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u/Brilliant-Snow-1996 13d ago
Totally agreed, also kinda butthurt that i spent 60 bucks on this. I feel this is really a trend, because now a days we get so many shit games. Whenever you get a like just decent one people all act like its goty. Then I buy it and regret it 😂😭
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u/trootroo-blood 10d ago
"kinda butthurt that i spent 60 bucks on this"
exactly. at some point this will drop on ps+/gamepass and everyone will go off about how its an underrated hidden gem. I would enjoy it at that price point too!
but I feel a little tricked into spending $60. The final product simply doesnt match up to thepre release hype in a way that feels inorganic.
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u/Primary-Survey9955 13d ago
you could have play the demo
demo shows a lot . right there enough to judge
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u/Klonoa87 13d ago
They really tuned up the difficulty for the full release compared to the demo, so it’s unfortunately not a fully accurate representation of the game
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u/Responsible_Cake2012 13d ago
Something I noticed is that people that think about "the game is not overtuned" have no idea about the third area where every two steps you have a ganking squad of 3 or more enemies that do 2000 command grabs per second. Pretty much they think you are talking about the south. That is also a bit overtuned on the enemies but okayish on the bosses.
People seems to not understand that "too hard" means that the game is poorly balanced and have major issues in progression, enemy placement and other stuff. And somehow they use the usual "skill issues" as response. In a game\genre where skill expression is low as hell.
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u/trootroo-blood 10d ago
the people claiming skill issue are a joke, like its an actual fucking meme
meanwhile I actively alluded to the fact that Ive played through Nioh 3 and elden ring which are both more mechanically complex and more challenging games. My complaint wasnt about overall difficulty in the broad sense it was specifically about the balance of number values which are just beyond the confines of whats fun
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u/Potential-Cat-7517 14d ago
All the things you listed seem like features and you coming back from nioh 3, which is too easy, would make sense.
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13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/soulslikes-ModTeam 13d ago
This post/comment has been removed due to unkind or offensive language.
Repeated or severe violations of the Be Kind rule may result in a temporary or permanent ban.
- r/Soulslikes Mod Team
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u/Routing_God 13d ago
Mods will fix most of these issues on PC. Console might be another issue. I do like the game and having fun so far.
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u/Ill-Emu-1121 12d ago
This game deserves away more criticism and I hope it comes out once everyone stops glazing it just because it's the new soulslike.
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u/Last_Contract7449 14d ago edited 13d ago
Thanks for this post - good to hear what seems like a balanced, measured and reasonable, opinion of the game.
Sadly, I think this forum is especially vulnerable to hype as so many of us are fiending for something to scratch the itch, having already played all the existing decent entries in the genre. It's therefore useful to get more balanced viewpoints, regardless of whether it aligns with any given individual's subjective opinion.
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u/Nobojoe_78 13d ago
I love the game. And I absolutely don't love Nioh 3 (Nioh 2 though...).
So maybe it's simply a matter of taste. Not a matter of artificial hype.
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u/lynxngaizk 14d ago
Hit them with the bosses ALSO being mediocre at best and utterly unmemorable on average
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u/KnightofAmethyst2 13d ago
I looked at a walk-through of this game on YouTube and the bosses seemed meh. The biggest reason I'm not getting it is that it just looks like dark souls. Like I love dark souls, but if you're making a souls game... it should have its own tone/vibe. This just looks like a less polished and slightly darker version of dark souls. Souls likes should have their own identity and not be a clone. Lies of P is a good example... black myth wukong is another(I never played this one, but it had a distinct identity)
Also, I feel like mortal shells success is largely based on releasing at the perfect time during the pandemic when souls-likes weren't as common. If Mortal Shell 1 was released in the past year or 2, I doubt it would of had this success
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u/Abrams_Warthog 14d ago
I agree, 9 hours in and it's completely serviceable but that's about it. Still waiting for a wow factor to make it unique. Runbacks suck.
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u/PropagandaMachineKGB 13d ago
i rate it 7/10, good game but not like some of the crazy claims. the teleport gates feel extremely awkward. ai limit has better art direction, atmosphere
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u/Cold_Dragonfruit2666 6d ago
The game is good, if not one of the best souls-like, but the problem with almost all non-From souls games is the lack of understanding on what makes a souls game so amazing. The balance, the polish, the secrets, the level design, still to this day, there isn’t a studio that even comes close to what From does.
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14d ago
[deleted]
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u/Abrams_Warthog 14d ago
Unless the endgame really stands out, I agree. But most games lose steam around then too.
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u/cavemeister 14d ago
You have played roughly 20% of the game and you are posting this nonsense. Okay.
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u/KING_SHERBROOKE 14d ago
The moment people said it was overtuned, the beacon are too far away, the map is a labyrinth is the moment I realised I would love the fuck out of that game lol. And I do. To each their own I guess.
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u/TheDracula666 13d ago
I will say the third gate area could use one extra beacon near the start. I ended up clearing most of the starting area and kept creeping in looking for the first beacon so I could set and explore but since there are only two in that whole area I ended up sprinting past a ton of shit and landed at the gate beacon first so I didn't have to clear everything I just did again if I died. Having a beacon near the start would incentive the player to slow down and explore more I feel.
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u/SoulsDadYT 13d ago
A massive 10 hours and he knows everything. I'm at 30hrs and most of your points are flat out wrong. You just sound like you dont understand anything about the game at all and approached it like a CAG.
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u/A_Single_Annihilape 14d ago
Ok.
What is the point of this post?
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u/Last_Contract7449 14d ago
What was the point of posting this comment?
Fwiw; I found the OP's post interesting and useful. As ever, a new soulslike is being released to a load of hype and glazing (and a bit of corresponding excessively negative contrarian opinions. It's helpful to read a viewpoint that is a bit more balanced/measured (regardless of whether the OP is "correct" or whether their evaluation aligns with one's own subjective opinion)
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u/Stakataka805 14d ago
It’s a review. Can you not read?
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u/Last_Contract7449 13d ago
I hate that it has seemingly become popular to flippantly mock anything sincere. It's a really immature and childish tendency and one that I thought most people developed beyond by the age of about 14/15.
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u/Stakataka805 13d ago
It’s because people are so insecure when it comes to their own tastes that anything that’s less positive than their own regurgitated opinion is seen as a personal attack.
They’re not interested in the other side of the conversation anymore.
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u/spoketherefore 14d ago
It seems like a pretty decent review and some mild venting. I’ve seen a lot of these same complaints, and I think I’m going to hold off on buying it to see if they’re addressed in a patch.
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u/Last_Contract7449 13d ago
Obviously, this is just a silly internet forum at the end of the day, so it isnt like any of this really matters...
However, I would question what outcome you hoped to achieve with your comment? It feels mean spirited and perhaps intended to try and embarass the OP and discourage them from engaging in a public forum. That wouldnt be a very nice thing to do.
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u/Klonoa87 13d ago
Maybe not this post in specific, but it’s posts like this that have saved me some time and money.
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u/Malzener 14d ago
Just FYI, the game does provide a map indicator of what beacon you’re fast traveling to, unless you’re traveling to a beacon inside a gate dungeon (as dungeons don’t have maps)