Soulstorm certainly accomplishes its job of being a more worthwhile story followup to the first game. It's just a shame about almost every possible aspect of the gameplay. Way back when the first Oddworld game released on the PS1 and was a surprise hit, the studio got the mandate from their publisher: push out a sequel inside of 9 months. Against all odds, they managed to pull it off and delivered a game with more levels, more puzzles, more interactions, more mechanics, more challenge, more Mudokons to save... and a story that was a bit of a nothingburger. Still, Exoddus was a hell of a game, and fondly remembered. The main mind behind the series has wanted a do-over of Exoddus for a long time, and while Soulstorm does provide a more serviceable story, told in an ever-imaginative world with some genuinely breathtaking visuals, the gameplay rapidly gets bogged down in a hodgepodge of misinformed, underbaked, overwrought, buggy, inconsistent, frustrating, repetitive mechanics and encounters. You have to tangle with checkpoints (and sometimes unfixed gamebreaking glitches) that can and will lock you into unwinnable situations and force a full level restart, constantly fumble with an utterly vestigial crafting system, deal with some genuinely terrible level layouts, be miserably hamstrung by the karma system in everything you do if you want the True Ending, and worst of all, have to both survive and efficiently dispatch the threats in the mass escape sequences. It's not a bad game to watch an abridged playthrough of, but it has ironically become the mirror version of Exoddus; it went all in on presentation and had no idea how to build a fun game around it.
Up front: I am not recommending this game. I DO heartily recommend that anyone interested should try out the demo (which doesn't seem to be on GOG, unfortunately) because I have no complaints at all about what I've seen. Which is to say: pretty much an already-finished game polished to an impressive mirror sheen disguised as early access, and it seems to be doing everything right. The only problem is that depending on personal preference, the central gimmick might drive you as batty as it does me. There's a hex-based world map, each hex is a level, and you build outwards from the center. There are different biomes and possible modifiers, different randomized starting loadouts, and a lot of stuff to adapt to in general. You'll start by setting up some basics and breaking into nearby glades as you deforest, some of which will contain (clearly marked) major hazards and rewards. There are two progress bars on every level: one which fills by way of quotas and objectives, and one that simply progresses with time. If you fill the first bar, you win the level. If the second one fills, you lose. Then you pick a neighboring hex on the world map and do it all over again. For all this game does right and for the impressive variance you get to deal with while repeatedly building up a bunch of settlements from scratch... that particular loop isn't really my idea of fun. It has the mechanics, resource management, and personalization you'd expect from a longform city builder, but a level-based structure closer to that of a procedurally-generated Warcraft campaign in which you're fighting the environment and a time limit rather than a conventional opponent. You never get long enough with any one level to get exhausted of it, but you also don't get long enough to really admire it, and after playing X levels the titular storm rolls in and wipes the world map clean. This was already driving me bonkers by the end of the tutorial. If that part doesn't bother you, it's a great game.
I quite like Webbed on a number of levels; the visual design, the webslinging and physics, the sound work, the concept, the playful absurdity of everything going on. Music is alright but hearing the same tracks over and over and over gets repetitive. The level design is a very mixed bag. On the one hand, it's great fun to fling yourself around to traverse wide open areas, but it's less fun when you spend 10 minutes manoeuvring through a series of rooms only to find yourself at an empty dead-end, or greeted by an NPC telling you to return later, followed by having to hike your way back manually. Because despite that you do have business here, you did things out of order. No, you were not given a specific order to do things in. I thought we figured out about 20 years ago that you DON'T want to waste the player's time like this. Then there are the puzzles. Some of them are good! Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much exploration of the premise of needing to build your webs around increasingly intricate terrain and hazards, not that I'm sure how far you could really take that concept. Instead there's a recurring theme of "just build webbing around this general area", which is no better demonstrated than by the recurring "fling a cog into the gears in the ceiling" puzzle. Which, to call it a puzzle is a bit of a stretch. The cog is heavy and always dangles a certain distance from you, so the only method of approach is building webs *near* the gears, then either try to wrangle the physics into flinging the cog upwards with a far greater degree of precision than you can reasonably expect of someone swinging around an object heavier than they are on a thread suspended by their butt -- or attach copious webs between the cog and gears and attempt to bump it upwards, which usually just snaps the webs. This asinine physics maraudery has been required of me at LEAST a dozen times, and now it wants me to do it three more times in the same room. It's a really terrible gimmick. And then after a few hours of bungling through all of that I managed to wedge myself into the ceiling WITH one of the cogs at the exact same time as a quicksave triggered. My save file is now bricked with me stuck inside a wall, and I am NOT replaying that whole slog.
