Soul Balance Demo

Adventures and long journeys seem to only be feasible in stories and myths, for few people are able to drop everything nowadays and just travel the world without a specific purpose. Sure, the heroes in the said stories always have a great evil to hunt as well, so maybe their journeys are not exactly leisure material, especially when all sorts of creatures harass them on a regular basis.

Soul Balance is your typical role-playing game experience, in the sense that it only tries to emulate other games and not bother too much with originality. The concoction is a mixture of Final Fantasy and a few elements from western RPGs, such as goblins and the usual fantasy paraphernalia. You play from a third-person perspective, and most of the action revolves around random encounters with monsters.

The story does not try too hard to impress, and it’s as common as table salt at this point, especially if you are familiar with the RPG scene. Hence, it all starts with a beautiful kingdom that gets attacked and sacked by a mysterious army. Everyone from the kingdom is slain, except for one girl. You play the role of this young girl, and it is your mission to reclaim the kingdom from the invaders.

The gravest mistake one can make in the genre at hand is linearity, because it’s hard to play a role when you are told exactly where to go and how to walk there. In this case, the levels are almost as restrictive as the 2D environments in the old arcade games, which greatly undermines your ability to have fun. Not only that, but the random encounters are too repetitive as well, while nothing happens in between.

It’s nice to see some decent elements at work as well, such as the simple, yet effective turn-based combat mechanics, or the ability to switch weapons when they break. However, you might not last long enough to appreciate them, especially after you are faced with the boring and bland level design. The most unusual thing you stumble upon while exploring is the occasional tree, but even those look the same every time.

In the end, Soul Balance makes no effort to distinguish itself from the crowd, and it actually struggles to be as dull as possible more often than not. As such, you won’t find anything of value by playing it, unless the developers decide to put some effort into the atmosphere and the gameplay itself.