Soul Hackers 2's basic copy-paste dungeons are one of the worst aspects of the game's visual design. Engine differences are certainly part of the picture here, but aren't the whole story. But despite the limited hardware power inside the Switch, the rendering techniques there are much more mature and assets are generally higher-grade. Shin Megami Tensei 5 shipped last year on the Nintendo Switch, and shares many elements with Soul Hackers 2 - including most of the enemy models. It's particularly odd given the platform targets for this project - PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series and PC - which are all perfectly capable of handling more ambitious assets at the very least.Ĭomparing Soul Hackers 2 with Atlus's last game really highlights these issues. But the results here are very basic and aren't that far ahead of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles. Soul Hackers 2 runs on the Unity engine without the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) feature set, so I didn't expect technique-level parity with advanced software. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Post-processing is limited as well, as the game lacks per-pixel motion blur and bokeh depth of field. Cubemaps are remarkably simple and poorly aligned. Texture resolution is questionable, and there's minimal texture variety. The geometry budget is quite limited, which produces chunky-looking curved surfaces. All of the environmental lighting seems to be baked, and doesn't affect shadow-casting at all. Eighth-gen staples like physically-based materials, global illumination and screen-space reflections seem to be entirely absent - but that's just the start. However, the environments really expose the rendering weaknesses. The character rendering itself isn't state-of-the-art, but it doesn't need to be and works perfectly well here given the visual style. They feature suitably high polygon counts, have good texture work, and are smoothly cel-shaded. On the plus side, the 3D character models are reasonably high in graphical fidelity. Watch on YouTube Soul Hackers 2 - the Digital Foundry tech review, in video form. But you can't make a video game out of artistic flourishes alone - so how does the 3D rendering hold up? That fortunately extends to the rest of the package as well, with a keen sense of visual style. This formula is fairly novel by industry standards but if you've played other recent Atlus RPGs - particularly Persona 5 or Tokyo Mirage Sessions - you'll know what to expect. It's more like a TV show than a movie, with a 'villain of the week'-style narrative that features multiple short story arcs that build over time. Interpersonal conflicts and interactions take center stage here, and a social system gamifies out-of-combat interactions, giving simple conversations actual consequences. Soul Hackers 2 is a party-oriented title that weaves multiple characters through a winding, serialised story. Elsewhere, however, this game really shines. There are some twists, like an overkill-style mechanic that rewards strategic play, and plenty of customization. Soul Hackers 2 borrows its gameplay elements from other recent Atlus titles, so at a basic level, it's a turn-based RPG oriented around exploiting weaknesses, which is an enjoyable enough system but nothing out-of-the ordinary for RPG veterans. There's little here to suggest that the current wave of consoles are being taxed by this Persona-lite release - and the knock-on effect of that seems to be that the last-gen machines get some shocking ports, especially the vanilla Xbox One. 25 years is a long time in computer graphics, and Soul Hackers 2 has a wide variety of tech it could potentially use - but early footage didn't exactly impress. Four console generations later we finally have a sequel - Soul Hackers 2 - though it's really a standalone game with mostly thematic connections to the original. What's the longest you've ever waited for a video game sequel? Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was released all the way back in 1997 on the Sega Saturn, a first-person dungeon crawler JRPG made by developer Atlus.
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