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This year may be another "survival and construction year". At the beginning of the year, there was a well-known dark horse like "Phantom Beast Palu", and the recent "Seven Days World" has also been quite popular in China. Among all the new products, "Soul Mask" may be a relatively low-key one, but it can also be said to be the one with the greatest potential. The game currently has excellent reputation and performance overseas. The recent major update has made the game sales exceed 400,000, which is worthy of attention from domestic players.

The biggest feature of the game is the visor switching system that allows you to play any role. Combined with soul-style combat, a huge open world map, maze exploration, dungeon crusade and other elements, it brings a unique survival and construction experience. You can find many familiar gameplay and mechanics in "Soul Visor", and its experience is quite comprehensive in the survival and construction game genre.

The world presented in the game is not just an ordinary land, but a fusion of Mesoamerican civilization elements of Mayan and Aztec cultures, as well as a combination of primitive tribes and future high-tech. It also adds some pleasing sci-fi and humanistic elements beyond the conventional survival and construction content.

Although the game is still in the early access stage, every update released by the production team responds to the needs of players. The first large-scale update "Attack of the Visor" on the 18th of this month unlocked some useful functions in advance, optimized many details, and won praise from many players. Obviously, "Soul Visor" has the potential to become the next favorite of survival and construction game enthusiasts.

Judging from the overall performance and experience of "Soul Visor", its large amount of content, playable visor and switching system are very suitable for survival game players who like to build homes, play with multiple players or NPCs, and explore and fight monsters.

The mask is the protagonist

The "Soul Mask" is a magical artifact that players possess at the beginning of the game. When the game just starts, you may not feel its existence, but when the player's settlement begins to take shape and goes to an ancient ruin to unlock the "transfer" function, the amazingness of the mask begins to show.

It turns out that players can not only play the original protagonist, but also transfer souls between NPCs who have become members of the tribe. Since the skills and abilities of different tribesmen grow differently, switching between these characters is also fun. But usually, I will choose the most beautiful girl to play. Later, players can also enter the information of these tribesmen into the information database of the mask, so that they can be reproduced even if the character dies.

This setting of backing up the body at any time is very common in some sci-fi future games, but it brings a completely different feeling in a survival and construction game with an ancient civilization as the background. Players can also switch the characters they control according to the characteristics of different tribes, skill points or equipment they carry, which also brings some different strategic sense to some mazes and battles.

Not only that, there are currently up to ten masks to collect in the game. In addition to the initial three options, you can also pick up or make more advanced masks during the exploration process. Each mask has a unique skill tree, and changing the mask is equivalent to switching to another different profession.

For example, the "Abundance" visor I initially chose can enhance the long-range output capability of the bow, while the "Shadow" visor focuses more on stealth and backstab damage. Its mimicry ability can also make the character enter stealth state, making it easy to loot in the enemy camp; the "Tactical" visor can greatly enhance the ability of the tribesmen in battle, and is very suitable for players to wear when leading followers to attack the camp, or when multiple people go to the dungeon.

Therefore, constantly improving the abilities attached to the masks and unlocking and creating more advanced masks is also an important part of the game. This "mask" gameplay setting that runs through the entire game is both novel and eye-catching.

Reduce the burden, reduce the burden, and reduce the burden

Survival building games in the early access stage often lack comprehensive guidance, and most functions require players to explore on their own. Or the unlocking speed of the early game content is a bit slow, making players feel repetitive and tired. However, "Soul Mask" can be said to be the most friendly to beginners among the survival building games I have played, because its early experience can be said to be as fast as taking off.

The game's tutorial covers all aspects, including survival, combat, and construction. Almost every system will guide players step by step on how to operate. Although this mandatory teaching step may slightly affect the player's own exploration rhythm. In the first 10 hours of the game, I just felt that I was always led by the tutorial, running around just to complete the necessary buildings. Of course, this approach is still quite effective. At least in the subsequent time of the game, most of the problems I encountered can be found in the tutorial.

In addition, the game also has a powerful "custom world" function, which includes almost all numerical experiences, including the character's experience multiplier, damage multiplier, resource regeneration time, day and night cycle ratio, etc.

To be honest, no matter how deep and rich the content of a game is, if players cannot quickly experience the core fun after getting started, their enthusiasm for playing will be dampened. In this regard, "Soul Mask" generously gives the decision-making power to the players. For a social animal player like me who often does not have enough game time, it is really precious to meet such a production team that respects the player experience.

On the basis of teaching and customization, Soul Mask can realize "automatic collection and manufacturing" in the early stage. Players can easily set all collection tasks for tribesmen, including tree felling, quarrying, planting, as well as item storage, transportation and production queues. In addition to construction and planning, most of the work can be left to tribesmen. The comfort of this design is that players only need to make preliminary plans for the base and operations, and then they can boldly explore the unknown world.

A soul-like combat experience

Surprisingly, "Soul Visor" not only has a very solid foundation in basic survival construction, but also has a good performance in the combat system.

There are eight different types of weapons in the game. As your proficiency in using weapons increases, combat skills will be randomly unlocked. Currently, there are 75 combat skills that can be unlocked in the game. This also makes it possible to operate a lot during the battle. Unlike other survival and construction games where you just hold weapons and fight with enemies, here, the combat experience will be closer to the feeling of action RPG.

On this basis, the game also adds a "rebound" mechanism. When you are in defense and come into contact with an enemy attack, the rebound judgment can be triggered. Most weapons will force the enemy into a weak state when the rebound is triggered. This prevents players from attacking blindly, because the enemy is likely to suddenly parry and rebound, thus disrupting the player's offensive rhythm. On the other hand, this also gives skilled players the possibility of defeating the strong with the weak. As long as the operating skills are good enough, they can even ignore some of the numerical strength and challenge high-level enemies.

Maybe because the game is still in the early access stage, the combat feel of the game is a bit erratic. Although the movements are cool, the feedback when actually hitting the enemy is relatively rough. Especially when fighting with multiple people, the combat feel is even more difficult to describe.

On the other hand, the mechanical enemies in the ancient ruins can only be damaged by fists and sledgehammers, which may be puzzling at first. But when players throw corrosion cans that can be picked up around them, they will find that other types of weapons can also cause damage. When facing different types of enemies, finding ways to break through will also make the process more fulfilling. This detailed setting also brings different fun to players who love exploration.

Wandering in the vast world

The map of "Soul Mask" is very large. After more than ten hours of exploration, I was still wandering around the rainforest in the lower right corner of the map. From the overall map overview of the game, there are snow-capped mountains, deserts, volcanoes and other terrains to explore in the game. To explore every corner of the map, "Soul Mask" may take you dozens or even hundreds of hours.

The game adopts a "Ubisoft"-style open world exploration method, requiring players to go to specific locations to fight scout enemies and unlock surrounding maps and points of interest through "interrogation". In addition to building bases to expand the scale, continuously climbing the technology tree, training the level and ability of tribesmen, and collecting various rare resources, the game also has various dungeons, pyramid copies and optional BOSS challenges. Players can choose to fight with their own NPC tribesmen, or join other players' online servers to explore this huge world together.

But perhaps it is still the limitation of the early access experience. The game currently requires a lot of "hard work". Although you can reduce the hard work by customizing the resource multiplier, you will still feel that resources are scarce when playing normally. Especially some dungeons that unlock mask abilities require players to have bronze and black iron weapons and equipment to smoothly attack. But after players accumulate energy, level up, and climb the technology to the corresponding technology stage, there will not be much new gameplay and content left.

As an early access version, the content of "Soul Mask" can be said to be quite substantial, with the entire map and gameplay content fully presented. In addition, although the game is developed by a small independent team, it has been online for only about a month, and updates of all sizes have never stopped, with hundreds of optimization projects. Many optimizations are also customized based on player feedback, which shows that the development team listens carefully.

Conclusion

Soul Mask is a game that integrates the gameplay of survival and construction games. It is a refreshing experience for a player who is tired of survival and construction games. It is still a bit slow and complicated like similar games, but with the help of tribe NPCs and the setting of "custom multiplier", players can quickly enter the survival + exploration cycle that makes people addicted. In this game, you can experience almost the core fun of most survival and construction games.

Admittedly, the game's combat system still needs to be polished, and the freshness of the playable content also needs to be maintained through subsequent updates. However, the content currently provided by the game can already support survival and construction enthusiasts to play for a long time, and is even richer than many similar games that have been updated in the EA stage for several years.

There are more planned content for the game later, including new gameplay such as paragliders and implants, as well as the highly requested MOD community. With updates and optimizations, the world of Soul Visor will be more worthy of experience for survival and construction enthusiasts.