You’ve struck down every enemy in your path. Every goblin, wolf and scorpion fell to your mighty shovel. Your blood is pumping and your heart is beating to the rhythm of the cheesiest techno music you could hum in the heat of combat. You can feel yourself getting stronger by the hour, and you can’t help but wonder what you could use your newfound power for. Maybe you could go defeat some more goblins? Or some more wolves? Or you could go to that desert filled with treasure and kill some more scorpions…?
…Why are you doing this again?
Past Shadows
Created by renowned mobile game developer Mobirix, Soul Slayer Idle is, as the title would suggest, one of the company’s many idle games. The protagonist is transported into a dangerous fantasy world under mysterious circumstances (in Japanese speculative fiction, the technical term would be isekai’d) and must grow ever more powerful to fight through the literally endless hordes of monsters. Summon weapons and armor, extract shadows to gain a legion of your own and spend various resources to increase the ever-growing numbers on your statistic screens. After all, that is what all idle games are about, right?
I’ve played many idle games before, some even from the same developer. It’s not a good first impression that Soul Slayer Idle reused or outright copied many of the systems I’ve seen in Mobirix’s other titles, but it piqued my curiosity even more. Did they take what they learned and improved on the design? Or did they create a carbon copy of their other games for a quick cash grab?
Cheap Suit and Cat Ears
An important aspect of an idle game is presentation. Most of your time will be spent staring at the game or its menus, so the graphics and especially the audio design are crucial. Soul Slayer Idle sports a rather generic 3D look with not much refinement. It serves its purpose, but watching the action isn’t particularly interesting or varied. It lacks flair—the models and animations are rather standard and the special effects are either underwhelming or nonexistent.
Fitting the generic appearance, the soundtrack of Soul Slayer Idle consists mostly of repetitive techno music. This is what you will be listening to for pretty much your entire time playing, as it plays while you’re browsing menus and handling numbers. It was probably intended to accentuate the blood-pumping action on the mobile screen, but for the most part, it just helps make things feel even more droning. There isn’t much to say about the sound effects either—they exist, they are definitely there, but they never really go beyond battle grunts and generic weapon slams.
Soul Crusher
Being an idle game, you will spend most of your time idling. But even an idle game needs something for the player to do while they’re actively logged in and playing. Usually, this is done through various resource-spending activities to make your character stronger and various combat activities to make use of that strength. In Soul Slayer Idle there is plenty of the former, though it’s mostly the genre’s usual: spend experience to level up, spend gold to improve your statistics, spend gems to get better gear, etc.
In terms of the latter, though, the title has a serious lack of things to do to utilize your newfound strength. There are plenty of different dungeon types to do, but most of them end up feeling mostly the same as the main gameplay of idling. Kill a certain number of enemies within a time limit. Kill a certain number of enemies and then a boss within a time limit. Survive for a certain amount of time. Deal as much damage as possible in a certain amount of time. It all boils down to starting the fight and then waiting until it’s over.
Some idle games allow the player to take manual control of the action to fine-tune combat and be more efficient. Soul Slayer Idle offers no such thing. You can take control if you want to, but it confers no benefit whatsoever. It just means activating your abilities manually instead of letting the game do it whenever they’re off cooldown. There is no way to optimize your dungeon fights. If you want to get stronger, you just have to idle. If you want to use that strength to progress… you just have to idle.
Slow Burn
Not every game mode is available from the get-go. For most of them, you need to either reach a certain level or get far enough in progression to unlock them. This is usually done to not overwhelm the player with too many options from the very beginning. In this case, though, it also helps accentuate just how similar every activity feels to one another. Every alternative game mode boils down to being a stat check—making sure you have high enough numbers to progress so you can increase your numbers even further.
The biggest change during progression is reaching certain milestones, after which you can progress to the next world. During my time playing, though, these areas didn’t impress me all that much. I started out in a green field of grass, progressed to another identical-looking field of grass, then later ended up in a field of grass that was slightly more yellow-looking. Since there are many more worlds to discover, I’m sure the areas get more interesting eventually, but it’s certainly not a very exciting first impression.
Worth of a Soul Slayer
Of course, being a mobile idle game, Soul Slayer Idle has plenty of ways for players to spend money to speed up progression or skip ads. Maybe I just haven’t played enough to get to the stingy part yet, but throughout my experience with the title, I never felt like I wasn’t receiving enough resources for free just for playing. You can spend money to gain more gems and gain some advantage that way. As long as you log in often though, gems should not be an issue for a long time. This is one thing I will give Soul Slayer Idle. The title is meant to be a long-term time investment. You’re not in a hurry to advance. You need to spend money only at your leisure.
Even so, I can seldom give the title bonus points for not being as predatory as the norm. That doesn’t make the experience better. Time spent playing Soul Slayer Idle is not time spent meaningfully. Any fan of idle games knows how oversaturated the genre is. You should have no problem finding something with a little more purpose. But if you are a fan of the genre, you don’t need me to tell you that.
