Lost Soul Aside Review - Screenshot 1 of 7

Finally getting to play a game that you've been waiting on for years can be a daunting experience. Expectations can shift significantly in that amount of time depending on marketing, previews, and the project's own development cycle.

Lost Soul Aside has walked a strenuous road to get where it is now. Originally a one-man effort, the game's scope was greatly expanded upon once PlayStation stepped in with its China Hero Project, in which it sought to support talented Chinese studios.

The thing is, you can still feel Lost Soul Aside's indie origins underneath its AAA-leaning guise. There's a blatantly obvious passion behind the title's action, taking clear inspiration from the likes of Devil May Cry and PlatinumGames' catalogue. It's a real ode to the character action genre.

But that core of hectic, reaction-based combat has been steadily, and sometimes questionably, surrounded by the typical layers of modern game design. Lost Soul Aside can't just be a flat-out action game — it needs a shockingly generic story, walk-and-talk sequences with one dimensional characters, skill trees, crafting ingredients, and loot that provides imperceptible stat boosts.

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And yet, weirdly, the release doesn't feel bloated. More than anything, all of the elements that we just mentioned simply feel a bit tacked on — like they exist because this is now a $60 PS5 game, and not the passion project of one guy back in 2014.

We don't know if original creator Yang Bing had settled on Lost Soul Aside's story all those years ago, but we do know that it's easily the worst part of the finished release.

Some really rough English voice acting aside, this is a seriously tired tale of an oppressive empire, a ragtag band of rebels, and an otherworldly enemy — thought to have been vanquished 1,000 years ago — that's mysteriously returned to threatens mankind's very existence.

World building barely features outside of some character bios buried in the menus, and as mentioned, the characters themselves are paper-thin. The game isn't drowning in dialogue — thank god — but it does assume that you care about the cast enough to walk around and chat with them every now and again.

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From stunningly dull protagonist Kaser and his dragon spirit companion Arena, who never shuts up, to the myriad tropey females who follow in our lead's wake, it's just about as cliche a narrative as you can imagine. And that's without even touching on all of the capitalised fantasy and sci-fi names being thrown about with little to no explanation.

But look, you don't play Devil May Cry for the story, and it's the same deal with Lost Soul Aside — it's just that said story takes up a lot more time than it does in Capcom's classic series. Indeed, you're here for the pulse-pounding action that's been promised since the game's initial reveal — and the good news is that, for the most part, it's a blast.

Combat hinges on flashy combos, special moves, and two extremely important defensive techniques: dodging and blocking. During the opening hours, it's a little unclear as to how much depth the title's action actually offers — but get a few bosses under your belt and a couple of new weapons in your arsenal, and you start to realise that so much time and effort has been poured into providing players with a huge amount of freedom.

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Against regular foes, you're encouraged to style on 'em, cracking out crazy combos and seeing just how dominant you can be. Taking down standard opponents is fun at first as you explore Kaser's increasingly absurd arsenal of special moves, but regular fights do start to feel like a chore later on.

And it's not because of the combat system itself, which always seems to be offering up some new toy to play with. It's more down to the enemies becoming tediously chunky towards the latter quarter of the game.

Reskinned opponents start popping up with alarming frequency, and before you know it, you're pulling off these insane combos just to whittle down the health of one target within a sea of similar monsters.

Lost Soul Aside is roughly 20 hours long, so it's not some sprawling RPG epic, but it's still easy to roll your eyes at this late-game padding, where empty environments funnel you into one lengthy clash after another.

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Thankfully, things really heat up against bosses — and there are a lot of bosses. There's an impressive selection of villains to conquer, and although some of them will stick in the mind much longer than others, they're all pretty satisfying to overcome.

While we do think that the combat system loses some of its of spice against these powerful foes — who can't be staggered or combo'd until you whittle down their armour — the spectacle of each encounter is usually enough to make up for the more methodical flow.

These are the battles where your dodges and blocks need to be on point. There's a boss, maybe three or four hours in, which essentially acts as a gatekeeper for the rest of the adventure. It's a hefty difficulty spike for that point in the game, but once bested, you know what Lost Soul Aside is all about.

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These aren't the kind of dodges and blocks that can be spammed, by the way. The timing windows are tighter than you may initially think, but the trade-off is that blue-coloured visual effects indicate attacks that can be parried. Needless to say, you're probably going to be dying and retrying against many of these bosses until you've got the tells and patterns down.

We're not saying Lost Soul Aside is brutally hard, but it can be demanding — and there are no difficulty settings to fiddle around with. We'd probably liken its challenge to fellow PS5 console exclusive Stellar Blade; you have several highly effective defensive options to consider, but the difficulty lies in being able to use them correctly.

We're fans of the action, then, but we do think that, far too often, it's held back by a lack of weight and impact.

Now, Kaser's fighting style is meant to be agile, slick, and graceful, but whether it's an especially floaty animation, a total lack of enemy reaction, or a noticeably absent sound effect, some attacks just don't hit like they should, and it can sap battles of their moment-to-moment satisfaction.

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We suppose this loops back to the game's indie roots. There's a fundamental lack of polish — or at least $60 polish — throughout Lost Soul Aside. The emotionless character models look like wax dummies, the environments have a placeholder vibe, and the technical performance is off.

To elaborate on that last point, the game holds a smooth frame rate in combat, but it suffers from odd hitches during traversal — even on PS5 Pro. What's more, the audio tracks are poorly mixed; music will cut in and out as you transition from in-game cutscene to brief load screen and back again, while some sound effects seem to just disappear entirely.

Conclusion

We're torn on Lost Soul Aside. On one hand, it's a very intricately made action game, full of interesting combat dynamics backed by an impressive degree of player expression. But on the other, it's a pseudo RPG with a really poor story, crappy characters, and a forgettable world.

We could overlook a lot of these flaws if the action was truly tip-top, but even the combat stumbles in the face of spongey foes and a frustrating lack of weight. Lost Soul Aside is an admirable attempt at aping the greats of its genre, but it just doesn't have the same edge as its inspirations.

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