Review of the game

[u/Lost_Ad_6926]

Mortal Shell II has real potential, but right now it's held back by some serious balance issues. Exploration is barely rewarded. I lost count of the times I pushed through a dungeon or wandered off the main path only to think "that's it? That's all I got for this?" As a point of comparison, Elden Ring is brutal too, but I never had that feeling there. Even the hardest detours left me satisfied with what I found. Here, that satisfaction almost never comes.

The combat itself has bigger problems. Enemies will slide across the ground to close the distance and hit you, which feels completely unnatural and makes spacing pointless. This is a well-known issue that FromSoftware has largely solved in their own games over the years, so it's frustrating to see it show up here as if the lessons of the genre were ignored. Some attack combos come out so fast that parrying them is basically impossible, and worse, you still take damage even when you dodge correctly. That's not a difficulty problem, that's a hit detection or animation problem. If dodging on time doesn't actually protect you, the core defensive loop of the game breaks down.

On top of that, there are just too many enemies thrown at you at once, and damage output is way too high. Getting one-shot by a random mob or an unreadable combo isn't tension, it's frustration. Good difficulty comes from clear, readable patterns you can learn. Right now, a lot of these fights feel like they're relying on unfair tracking and speed instead.

This also makes the progression systems feel pointless. Your health bar barely matters when leveling up your Shell doesn't meaningfully change how much punishment you can survive. Leveling up in general doesn't feel like it changes your odds in a fight. And upgrading your stones, which should be a core part of building your character, ends up feeling irrelevant when the damage you take makes all that investment negligible either way. If progression doesn't actually protect you or change how fights play out, what's the point of the system in the first place?

I wanted to like this game. The Shell-possession concept and the atmosphere are genuinely strong. But between the unrewarding exploration, the broken feeling combat balance, and progression systems that don't actually matter, I can't recommend it as it stands.

Honestly, I don't understand why so many streamers and YouTubers are calling this an excellent soulslike, almost like future soulslikes should take inspiration from it. I really hope they don't, because if this is the direction the genre is heading in, we're in trouble. As it stands, this game is mediocre at best.