preview Dolmen: a mixture of Dead Space and Dark Souls?
It’s hard today to count the games that claim Souls from From Software. With varying degrees of success, the Japanese studio’s formula has been used several times, often with different approaches, but not always very happily. The imminent arrival of Elden Ring has whetted fans of the genre appetite and next year Dolmen will try to grab a piece of the pie by taking up the basics of the challenging action RPG while carrying it in a terrifying universe. We got to play it for a handful of hours and here are our first impressions.
Academic basics
Set in a futuristic universe, Dolmen sends you to the planet Revion Prime in search of a crystal whose properties would revolutionize space exploration. Problem, the place it is in is especially hostile and you have to fight your way through hordes of enemies in different environments and of course face bosses. We were able to interact with the game for a little over 3 hours and the version of the game that we had in hand was divided into several parts that represented more or less advanced stages of the Massive Work title.
You will quickly become familiar with dealing with dolmens. Target acquisition system, heavy attack, fast attack and evasion, due to a stamina display, the relative fragility of our hero in the face of powerful enemies whose attacks can be repelled at the right time … the foundations of the genre are laid and recited with a certain academicism
We recharge our batteries
Indeed, in addition to hand-to-hand combat regulated by your stamina meter, A very versatile energy bar allows you to do three things: healing, ranged combat, and elemental attacks. In the first case, pressing a button will definitely use some of your energy to restore a greater or lesser part of your health. Ranged combat allows you to use your different weapons (you can equip two and switch them in a snap) but only temporarily weakens your display. You then have to regard the latter as a charger that as soon as it is empty will ask you to wait for it to be recharged. After all, elemental attacks work on the same principle. Activate the energy mode at the push of a button and each of your melee hits causes powerful damage of various kinds, depending on the equipment you choose. As far as the weapons are concerned, you can benefit from these effects until your display is exhausted, which is gradually reloaded. It will therefore be necessary to learn to juggle the various options. It is important to sacrifice energy to heal yourself, but if you overdo it you will deprive you of elemental and ranged attacks, which are very important and the use of which is clearly encouraged by the game.
Are there still many adjustments coming?
Unfortunately, in practice, at least for the moment, this identity is tarnished by many red flags. Aside from the obvious rigidity of most animation that sometimes makes you smile, and an artistic direction that is not always very inspired, Dolmen sins for the time being due to the lack of reaction to the blows carried out in the fight and due to the not always obvious legibility of the action. Regarding this last point, sometimes questionable camera choices prevent viewing too much prior to the damage points inflicted and the multitude of certain effects of blows from seeing the enemy’s next move. In a game where parrying and dodging are crucial, it can be very frustrating not to anticipate visual cues due to information overload and camera effects. Adding to this confusion is a sometimes destabilizing sluggishness of blows and a rather strange assessment of the range of melee attacks. This overload needs to be moderated a bit to improve the fight section.
Additionally, some level design decisions aren’t very lucky, and some mismatch between the damage taken and the positioning of enemies attacking you from a distance or sometimes even through walls due to multiple mistakes, make crossing levels quite frustrating. If you’re used to the genre, you won’t be surprised to receive an attack from an enemy hidden in the corner of an L-shaped hallway, but you might be more frustrated to find it inaccurate at times to dodge that attack and a single damage will cause you to swing the gun to the left. Dolmen can sometimes prove to be unnecessarily punitive, especially since the gameplay is not yet precise enough to warrant such punishments.
Will we come back out of fear?
By the way, death is very classic. Beacons mark the levels and thus serve as a place of reappearance. Each enemy killed brings you resources, which you can then, when they have been brought back to your ship by the said beacons, spend in various statistics to increase your resistance, your damage or your energy meter. This will be necessary to take on the bosses, who were pretty nondescript to the two we faced. A giant spider closed a level in a jar filled with arachnids and some kind of magician was in another level, desert and not very terrible, also closer to the aesthetic of The Surge than a dead room. The horror dimension announced by the game therefore seems to be quite behind for the time being and it remains to be seen how these very different atmospheres and environments become a coherent whole. Maybe thanks to the scenario that we know little about right now.
Our impressions
Those few hours in the company of dolmens made us feel the influences, good intentions and ambitions of Massive Work Studio as well as its modest means. Energy management, dodging, melee and ranged combat could be a promising focus of future gameplay, but too many imbalances make the experience harder than it should be. Though quite classic and not daring in structure, however, if it balances the gameplay more, Dolmen could be a decent Souls Like in the long run, but arguably not memorable. So be patient, the game is planned for a wave in 2022.
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Journalist igamesnews.com
December 30, 2021 at 7:35:02 PM
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