Mortal Shell Review (Kill3r)
Yet another Dark Souls clone that completely misses the mark.
This a very simplistic and extremely short game
You have a central hub and then 3 separate areas, each with a boss. After you beat the 3 bosses, you return to the hub area and fight the final boss. If you know the maps, you can probably get it done in under 4 hours.
My biggest gripe with this game is the level design, it's absolutely terrible
The central hub area is a swampy forest, but it's very convoluted, like a maze; also, everything looks the same, so you will get lost a lot.
The 3 separate areas are for the most part linear, so they don't suffer from the same issue. Although, in one area, you have to traverse it by using some teleporters, and you have to remember the order in which to use them, because they send you to different parts of the area, and these parts are, again, quite maze-like.
The final boss is terrible
It has a ton of health, it spawns aggressive adds during the fight and, once per battle, it consumes said adds to regain health.
The game really shows its AA origin, and not in a good way
- They misspelled one of the achievements, ffs (after you beat a boss called The First Martyr, you get an achievement "Martyr'd the Matyr".
- Also, it's like the game tries to be obnoxious. After you die, you respawn in front of a Sester (the level-up NPC, kind of like a firekeeper), and she always has a dialog line. This gets really annoying after dying to the boss a few times, like "there's no need to remind me that I'm bad at this game". I turned the dialog volume slider to 0 because of this. I'm sure the voice acting in this game is amazing, but I'm never going to find out.
- The DLC is the exact same game, but now in roguelite form. I haven't bought it, because it sounds terrible.
Also, as with other games, the DLC achievements appear in the achievement list even if you don't own the DLC (not sure if this is a Steam limitation, though), which I hate.
- There's plenty more of these little quirks, but this review is getting quite long already.
The story is... there, I guess
You are a Foundling, some sort of alien creature, and you can inhabit Shells, armors of fallen warriors. However, nothing is really explained.
- Each Shell has its own unique skill tree, and each unlocked skill also unlocks a bit of lore about the warrior that inhabited it previously. It's an interesting concept, but the problem is that some skills are quite uninteresting/bad or too expensive, so you won't probably get the whole story.
- You do find some monoliths with notes around the world. In addition, there are some hidden notes that only appear when you hit certain walls and that reveals the true history of the world, but, without a guide, good luck finding those.
To be fair, it does some things well, or, at least, differently
+ The hardening mechanic is interesting. Basically, you can harden your shell, which makes you invulnerable to all damage. You can remain hardened indefinitely, until you let go of the button or are hit by an attack. This ability has a relatively short cooldown. The fun thing is that you can do this at almost any time: while attacking, while healing, while dodging etc. While you are hardened, any effect you are under continues, e.g. your stamina replenishes, you continue to regen health if you used a healing item etc.
There are also consumables that give boosts if you are hit while hardened.
So, there are quite a lot of gameplay elements and combinations possible.
+ If you take lethal damage, you are instead ejected from your shell and have to get back to it. Thus you kind of have an extra life. If you are hit even once in your shell-less form, you die.
There is a (rare) consumable that gives the extra life; there is also a skill that gives the extra life after you kill a certain amount of enemies, though it's quite expensive.
+ Visually, the game doesn't look bad, it's quite gritty and has this depressing vibe to it.
The separate areas are all different to each other and visually distinct: one is fire/lava, one is ice and the last one is obsidian/rocks. The bosses are also related to these elements, both visually and with their attacks.
All in all, I recommend avoiding this game, or at least getting it on a deep discount.