Shining Soul Critic Reviews

The graphics are sparse, and long attack animations make control slow to respond, but RPG elements mix well with the action to make a satisfying adventure.

Achieves portable "Diablo"-ness like no one's business... The main problem with is that it quickly gets repetitious and is best played with the three friends that the game supports.

Eminently playable, and more importantly, replayable. All the hacking and slashing should get old after a while, but the infamous "quest for stuff" kept me going for the long haul.

The action is poorly designed and repetitive, and the quest is void of challenge.

A super-deformed take on Diablo, wholly devoid of strategy or audiovisual pizzazz.

It's an action/RPG, and a pretty boring one at that - a repetitive dungeon attack that feels like an unexciting "Diablo."

A little light on dialogue and only has one village but it supports up to four players and sticks to a formula steeped in nostalgia.

The simplistic gameplay and the lack of both difficulty and any real pressing motivation to complete the game severely limit any appeal.

Just feels like a shell of a design, good ideas and intentions spattered thoughout boring action sequences.

Hardcore? Don't be fooled, chaps. Maybe, somewhere, deep within the bowels of the hardcore gamer there's a desire to play endless, sprawling, repetitive games which offer no motivation to continue, but really, if you're looking for a hardcore RPG status symbol, then pick up Breath of Fire II or Golden Sun - or buy Zelda, because that's a real-time RPG done right.

Shining Soul is too shallow to appeal to the turn-based RPG crowd and the combat is too tedious to appeal to action RPG fans, or indeed anyone not wanting to inflict a repetitive strain injury upon themselves.

A game that reeks of potential, but winds up being extraordinarily dull and uninventive. The game mechanics, while solid, are boring and overly simplistic, the graphics are old, and the sound is simply dated and awful.

While it does the multi-player thing better than most games, the single-player mode is nothing more than a single-player version of the multi-player mode. There's no story, no strategy and really nothing that you could call innovative.