CrossfireX

Based on Smilegate’s super-popular free-to-play shooter, CrossfireX garnered attention because Remedy was behind its campaign. However, this was little more than two short “Operations” with bad writing, cliched and boring gameplay, and terrible AI. The studio’s trademark panache was missing here, though the Northlight Engine looked decent, and the “revamped” multiplayer didn’t offer much either.

Gungrave G.O.R.E

Some games are developed for years, and you hate to see them launch as Gungrave G.O.R.E has. Any notions of style that Overdose may have had all those years ago are overridden by an ugly visual style, from the characters to the levels. The story sounds like it could make for some B-movie-level fun but ends up confusing and outright time-wasting. Gameplay-wise, the sheer amount of jank in animations, movement, and combat are just awful all around.

Source of Madness

In theory, Source of Madness sounds cool. It uses procedural generation to create its Lovecraftian-esque nightmares and neural network AI to animate them. Unfortunately, this results in unpredictable enemies, further adding to the brutal difficulty alongside the shoddy controls. Even if you can appreciate the aesthetic, the sheer lack of strategy that enemies display, horrible bosses, and lackluster progression ensures little payoff for surviving this nightmare.

Winter Ember

As a dark fantasy stealth title, Winter Ember felt pretty ambitious with its 30 arrow types, 70 passive and active skills, and open-ended gameplay. The interesting aesthetic and setting are hampered by poor combat, awful enemy AI, shoddy cover while sneaking, and the same repetitive gameplay loop. Even the audio design, an essential part of a stealth experience, is not good, executing any hope one could have for this mess.

XEL

A sci-fi adventure inspired by Zelda with an appealing art style – what could go wrong? As XEL proves, quite a lot. The sheer number of bugs and lack of polish will put you off immediately. Once you make it further in, the combat and visuals can be somewhat satisfying, but the awful story undercuts them. Too much repetition and some baffling design decisions will further kill your interest if you’re still somehow playing.

The Last Oricru

Serving as one of the poster games for the new Prime Matter label, The Last Oricru takes clear inspiration from other Souls-like titles. But that’s all it is – a shallow inspiration where everything sticks out for all the wrong reasons. It may be the annoying main character, user interface, controls or how clunky everything looks. Whatever it may be, The Last Oricru doesn’t feel good to play, look at or think about.

Dolmen

Like The Last Oricru, Dolmen is a Souls-like but sci-fi with cosmic horror. It’s also terrible, with combat missing many key features and melee combat feeling janky and poorly tuned overall. Despite how interesting the sci-fi premise looks, it’s all fluff with no real purpose or sense that fails to hook you.

MX vs ATV Legends

MX vs ATV Legends isn’t bad enough to be truly awful, but it’s enough to be annoyingly mediocre. Multiple types of vehicles to race with? Good. The slippery controls and haphazard AI? Bad, though the former has reportedly improved. The open world aspect? Good. The lack of anything to do in it? Bad. We could go on with the physics, sound design, polish, and so on. While the new Trails mode and regular tracks are decent, it’s not enough when everything else is undercooked.

The House of the Dead: Remake

With all the remakes we’ve seen in the past few years, The House of the Dead: Remake could have been something good. Maybe not great, but still good. Developer MegaPixel Studio kept almost everything as is, but the visual upgrades look too dark and ugly. The remixed soundtrack comes across as bland, and the lack of much new content (save for the missable horde mode) makes it feel overpriced. The less said about the controls and performance issues, the better.

Diablo Immortal

Maybe it’s fun on mobile, but Diablo Immortal on PC is a travesty. Its user interface is horrid, with annoying pop-ups – especially during gameplay, resulting in misclicks – and the combat is an even more dumbed-down version of Diablo 3. The campaign is there, but any interesting plot is offset by the stupid progression blockers and grinding required. The sheer scale of monetization is also appalling, to the extent that certain end-game activities are just locked off to free players. Even without it, Diablo Immortal would still be a mess as opposed to the ongoing trainwreck.

Monark

Lancarse’s track record has been a bit spotty this year, as anyone who played The DioField Chronicle will attest. There was some hope for Monark, developed by a few former Shin Megami Tensei series members. It has a school setting, Egos, and an Otherworld to explore, just like SMT and Persona. It differs, however, in the awful pacing, repetitive gameplay, and troubling characterization, to say nothing of the shallow visuals and environments. With so many other great RPG efforts this year, like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Trails from Zero, and so on, Monark hardly warrants a look.

LEGO Brawls

A platform fighter based on LEGO sets sounds appealing in theory. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. Originally released for iOS in 2019, LEGO Brawls made its way to consoles and PC this past September. Despite its looks, the gameplay quickly becomes boring (with little difference between characters), and the sheer grind required to unlock things is a chore. The lack of stuff to do doesn’t help either.

ELEX 2

I found ELEX to be a drag, but Piranhabytes’ sci-fi action RPG garnered a dedicated cult following after its release. ELEX 2 seemed a good time to capitalize on this and deliver something better. Sadly, it’s also full of clunky combat, dull writing, boring open-world design, monotonous side quests, and an underwhelming presentation. Being able to fly with a jetpack doesn’t count for much when there are so many bugs, and the DirectX 12 rollout is a whole other rigmarole on its own.

IKAI

Despite its low production values, IKAI could have been a nice little horror title, weaving in Japanese folklore in unique ways. Alas, it falls flat. It’s very short, the plot makes little sense, and it abruptly ends with almost no payoff. This wouldn’t be too terrible if the gameplay and horror were up to par, but the former is too restrictive and lackluster, while the latter offers bland jumpscares.

Blackwind

In some alternate universe, Blackwind would have been a decent twin-stick shooter/action RPG hybrid. Unfortunately in this timeline, its premise can’t withstand the horrible story, mind-numbingly dull exploration and progression, and awful combat. The glitches and poor controls further hamper your attempts to squeeze any enjoyment out of the experience.

Diablo Immortal

The day it was announced, nearly everyone expected Diablo Immortal to be a pay-to-win shitshow. The final product somehow exceeded their wildest expectations with a battle pass, premium battle pass, empowered battle pass, materials, bundles, cosmetics – anything and everything was for sale. Let’s not even get into entire endgame mechanics – like Awakening – only accessible by spending money. The real tragedy is that even if that was all stripped away, you’re left with a middling, dumbed-down clone of Diablo 3 with a terrible UI and loot.

Starfield

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way first. Bethesda Softworks’ upcoming Starfield is easily one of the most highly anticipated games right now. The game has recently received a lot of new details and Bethesda has done a fabulous job with its NASA-Punk designs. Starfield releases for Xbox Series X/S and PC in the first half of 2023.

If the heavily tread ground of Dolmen’s resource hunter/fight for survival story structure doesn’t tip you off to the uninspired game you’re in for, then the gameplay surely will. From top to button, this is a by-the-numbers Soulslike game that rewards cautious exploration and enemy attack memorization. It has ruthless enemies that make for punishing combat, different classes with various status point allocations to set them apart from each other, and of course beacons that serve as spawn points to which you return every time you’re inevitably slain.

"If the heavily tread ground of Dolmen’s resource hunter/fight for survival story structure doesn’t tip you off to the uninspired game you’re in for, then the gameplay surely will."

Upon returning, you’ll also be gathering everything you lost at the place you died if you can and trying harder next time. Choosing between a one-handed weapon and a shield or two-handed weapons, which element to focus your weapon crafting for, and which perks you assign to any given weapon or piece of armor are the keys to truly excelling at the game, and each choice has impacts on the combat that will immediately be felt. Even if the gun that shoots acidic bullets only does ten more damage than the gun that shoots ice bullets, that could make or break your situation, so observing how powerful or ineffective any given weapon is against any given enemy is paramount – along with constant energy management.

All of this is fine when it’s at its best, which isn’t a terrible thing. Fine is fine, despite lacking any sort of real special sauce. It does however lack polish – which is not fine. When I’m still shooting from the gun despite letting go of the gun button so I can attack with a melee weapon several entire seconds later – we have a problem. Just as we do when my well-timed giant sword slash goes right through an enemy without registering a hit. I also ran into several instances of controller buttons, like sprinting or the lock-on function just not working at all. Forcing me to play with a keyboard and mouse despite the game clearly indicating that the controller was supported and detected.

These would be forgettable bugs if the combat had something to it to make it worth trudging through its problems, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. Managing your energy with batteries and converting that into either energy attacks or health is a fun tug or war to balance out as you carve and blast your way through Revion Prime, though, and the game does a good job incentivizing you to keep an eye on that on top of just staying alive. So, hey, say what you will about how derivative it all is (and I will), but at the end of the day, Dolmen does achieve what it wants to on a fundamental level.

"Say what you will about how derivative it all is, but at the end of the day, Dolmen does achieve what it wants to on a fundamental level."

The weapon choices have tradeoffs with speed, power, and technique. Different enemies often require different approaches, and no matter how good you are, any fight can be the one that kills you next. There are even multiplayer elements included although I couldn’t find anybody during my playthrough for whatever reason. So, for what it’s worth, Dolmen does a good job of replicating this format in its own far-flung dystopian future setting. If it could only top it off with more consistent combat with more predictable hit detection and just a dash or two more originality thrown in, it could have been more than what it ultimately is, which is a bit of a wash.

The story side-steps a lot of the vagueness of Soulslike games, and actually benefits from that more than not. The interdimensional properties of the Dolmen element is a mildly intriguing centerpiece of the story, and while the content of that story is mostly forgettable sci-fi fodder, the setting itself is at least something I can understand as a justification for what is going on right from the get go, which is something a lot of Soulslikes don’t have, and is perhaps the best thing this game stumbles into in terms of putting meaningful twists on the format. It’s a very straightforward and reasonably well-realized world that is fun to uncover more often than not.

Representing the ideas of the game’s setting is a pretty nice-looking series of areas that change around just enough to keep the game from getting too drab. Even when the environments are at their blandest, you can still tell some TLC went into their designs. When you’re just admiring the environments, you might even forget you’re playing a budget title for a moment. While your weapons, attack animations and most of the enemies often tip over into the generic side of the spectrum, the areas themselves do have a lot of flavors despite perhaps feeling a tad incoherent when considered as all part of the same world.

"Dolmen does a respectable job of recreating most of the core elements that have carried the Soulslike genre to – and kept it in – its current prominence, and if you’re a hardcore Soulslike fan then perhaps that’s enough for you, but given its lack of polish, and just a general disinterest in meaningfully iterating on hardly any of its many borrowed ideas, it’s a bit of a tough sell to anyone outside of the most dedicated Soulslike players."

Dolmen does a respectable job of recreating most of the core elements that have carried the Soulslike genre to – and kept it in – its current prominence, and if you’re a hardcore Soulslike fan then perhaps that’s enough for you, but given its lack of polish, and just a general disinterest in meaningfully iterating on hardly any of its many borrowed ideas, it’s a bit of a tough sell to anyone outside of the most dedicated Soulslike players. Not having enough of your own ideas and failing to execute some of the borrowed ones isn’t a good mix. That said, what is here is a mostly functional recreation of the core Soulslike elements through a dark sci-fi lens that you don’t see every day. Plus, the genuinely cool looking environments and more straightforward story could certainly result in a good time for fans of sci-fi and Soulslikes that don’t mind a moderate amount of jank and dullness here and there.

This game was reviewed on PC.

DOLMEN sees players playing as a soldier sent to an alien planet infested with well, aliens and monsters in order for an unmentioned objective. Of course, gameplay seems to be the focus – and DOLMEN is a hybrid of an third person action game and a shooter. Players can equip a bunch of ranged weapons to slay down monsters from a distance or get up and close with a variety of melee weapons. There’s also a bevy of armorsets that players can equip, hinting at a robust build system.

DOLMEN releases for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S sometime in 2022. The game certainly looks intriguing although not as polished or visually impressive as say, Returnal. Nevertheless, it’s worth keeping an eye out for.

Koch Media’s new publishing label Prime Matter will publish Dolmen in 2022, though a more specific release date of the game has yet to be announced. A new trailer re-announcing the game has also been released, and it shows glimpses of its gameplay, locations, enemies, and more. It’s looking like a curious cross between H.R. Giger and Dark Souls. Take a look below.

When Dolmen launches in 2022, it’ll be available for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more updates on the game.

Prime Matter have recently announced and provided updates on a number of other upcoming games as well, including The Chant, Encased, Echoes of the End, Final Form, CrossFire: Legion, The Last Oricru, Scars Above, and more.

Last year, The Surge showed us all that the Souls formula can work in a variety of context, and now Massive Work Studio, a team out of Brazil is hoping to bring their unique vision for what an action RPG inspired by From Software’s legacy can be to gamers everywhere, if their Kickstarter can hit its targets

DOLMEN is a sci-fi take on the genre where the player crash lands on an alien planet and has to harvest materials, often by force, in order to survive. The Kickstarter is seeking $90,000 USD by May 8 to help the team push the game over the finish line to release what looks like a mashup of Dark Souls and Dead Space by sometime in 2019. All those who pledge can have access to a demo right now.

Should the team hit their funding goal, they’re targeting the game for release in 2019 on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Should they be able to push well beyond that into their stretch goals, it might also find its way to Nintendo Switch. Are you interested in the game? You can check out the Kickstarter here and then don’t forget to leave us your thoughts in the comments.