Dolmen is the latest in the long line of games spilling in the wake of From Software’s juggernaut Souls games.
Developed by Massive Work Studio, Dolmen is billed as an action RPG SF Cosmic Horror title and deposits the Souls-like formula onto the mysterious planet known as Revion Prime.
Revion Prime is home to the crystal known as Dolmen. The crystal is rumoured to be capable of breaching the barriers between dimensions and those who control it will be able to revolutionise space travel. It’s your job to go in and locate samples of the crystals, but Revion Prime is ground zero for an alien invasion. Hostile lifeforms roam the corridors and realities are seeping into one another, creating a melting pot of a landscape for you to survive. Will you be able to complete your mission and find out exactly what went wrong on Revion Prime?
Souls-like Genre
As the Souls-like genre gets increasingly crowded, the question has to be what exactly does each newcomer bring to the table? And, as such, what does Dolmen bring to it as well. The Souls-like design is firmly in place as you explore Revion Primes world. The challenging difficulty, check. Die and retry the gameplay loop, check. Beacons that you revive at which also act as teleporters and enemy respawners, check. Leaving your hard-earned XP and Dolmen crystals at the site of your death, check. You have your light and heavy melee attacks, blocks and parry’s, a dodge roll and a stamina bar governing all of the above. But Dolmen does add some interesting wrinkles of its own.
Third-person ranged combat
The first is the addition of third-person ranged combat. Projectile weapons play a huge role in combat and can make all the difference in encounters. If you lock onto an enemy you can fire and strafe with ease or, for the more hands-on approach, aim down the sights as you snipe from a distance. Ranged weapons also benefit from light and heavy attacks but the heavy attacks do come at a price. Your guns are governed by an energy bar, which depletes as you use them and slowly recharges over time. However, the bar can be shortened in two ways. The first is by heavy attacks which knock a chunk of the bar off with each use or by the more conventional approach: healing.
Each time you heal, it knocks a section of the energy bar off which will put you into dire predicaments over and over again. Outside of touching a beacon which restores you completely, the energy bar can be refilled through the use of batteries, essentially Dolmen’s version of the Estus Flask. Using it in combat though is pretty tricky as you’re left open to attacks and can’t move for the few seconds it takes to recharge. It makes for some tense encounters in boss battles as you end up looking for a rare moment in which to recharge.
Another addition to the game is elemental attacks. Weapons can have different elemental attributes linked to them, such as fire, ice and acid. It’s not just great for helping to knock some much-needed points of an enemy’s health bar or to freeze them in place for a couple of seconds but also because enemies have status effects of their own that you have to watch out for and exploit. Just as you can do cryo damage to an enemy, so too can they debuff you. Finally, there’s your suit’s reactor which also adds elemental buffs to your attacks when activated.
Loads of Gear
Gear plays an important role in Dolmen and is just as important as improving your various stats with the experience you ratchet up. Gear needs to be crafted on your ship, which you can teleport to from any Beacon, and is built from the various pieces of equipment and parts that enemies drop and are scattered across the world. Thankfully there’s no need to find recipes and the crafting system is easy and painless, with each gear showing what parts it needs along with which stats are affected by them. Creating one piece of armour opens up the next tier of that armour for you to continue crafting. More exotic gear requires specialist parts that can only be gained from bosses that you will need to respawn for the required amount. Whether it’s a new sword or chestplate with higher acid resistance, you’re going to need to keep on kitting out your character.
Combat
Dolmen’s combat, however, is where the game doesn’t quite reach the stars.
The combat feels imprecise and extremely slow. Collision detection boxes aren’t the best and you usually have to be within the kissing range of an enemy to actually hit them, which has the disadvantage of you not being able to block attacks in time or, sometimes, even seeing them coming. And that’s when the collision works. This applies to items and switches too. You have to be practically on top of them to activate them. At times if you’re locked on during combat and want to use your projectile weapon, you’ll draw it but it just won’t work until you stop pressing the fire button and try again. It’s enough of an issue that I stopped trying to use it for quick-fire during boss fights.
Distances, for some reason, just seem incredibly difficult to judge here. Whether it’s how close you are to a switch to trigger it or to an enemy, things just feel. . off. Couple that with inconsistent collision detection and you have a good recipe for frustration, particularly if it looks like you’re just about to beat a boss and are whacked by an attack you were sure you weren’t close to.
And then there’s the game’s speed and ability recharge rates. It’s all exceedingly slow. Your character moves at a speed slower than a lazy Sunday drive and even the sprint is slow. It’s frustrating when moving through the environment and during boss fights especially. Your ability recharge rates recharge almost as slowly as you move, particularly your battery recharge rate. Stamina fares better but neither is as fast as it should be, often leaving you at a disadvantage. Both those bars, however, drain incredibly fast when in use. . .
I have nothing against slower, more tactical gameplay, but this doesn’t work when dealing with aggressive enemies. And Dolmen’s enemies can be quite aggressive, to the point where they will follow you through rooms and away from their patrol paths. That is when the AI activates correctly. You have just as much of a chance standing from a distance and plugging them with a rifle while they just sit and take it, as you do of them aggressively tracking you.
Cheap enemy placement and environment design
Dolmen also suffers from some really cheap enemy placement and environment design. Enemies will drop on you from above or spawn behind you on damaged bridges where you have nowhere to run to and, at some points, right at the entrance/exits of area transitions, which really works great as you load into an area and are immediately attacked. The environmental damage probably fares worse as you’re required to quickly navigate hazards that drain your life bar with ease and have tiny safe zones between them.
Visually Dolmen is pretty solid on PS4, despite some generic SF and world design. There’s a fair amount of enemy variety but they tend to err on the generic side so that nothing stood out particularly. The frame rate is consistent, which is paramount in these titles to keep combat smooth, but there were enough moments when the game took some time to load up an action which resulted in small hitches.
Dolmens levels are small, segmented affairs with shortcuts between areas that you unlock the further you progress. There’s no sprawling world design here, though the variety across the board is admirable.
And those Dolmen pieces you collect? Well, you need them to respawn bosses because the best gear only comes from crafting components they drop and because the experience gained starts to whittle away on later enemies once you’ve gained some levels. The bosses themselves can present a significant challenge, but only because of the game’s problematic combat and hitboxes along with some serious near-instant death attacks. More often they require some careful use of the environment to overcome, while at worst they spawn mobs at you. Dolmen does adopt some of the more annoying habits of Souls games, so if you like those moments where defeating Boss A leads directly into Boss B with no way to restock, you’ve got those too.
The game also has a multiplayer component but, as of writing this, there weren’t any matches available during the review period to test it out on.
Dolmen is a game that puts me in two moods about it. The game didn’t put its best foot forward in the beginning, but the more I played, the more I began to enjoy what was on offer. But for each enjoyable moment, there was a frustrating one due to its janky mechanics. Right now Dolmen feels like a title that still needs a good amount of work to bring it to where it could be.
Developer: Massive Work Studio
Publishers: Massive Work Studio, Prime Matter, Koch Media
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed on PS4 and played on PS5
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