While the story and acting provides an odd amusement to help keep you going, a few problems tempt you to quit at every turn. To start, Soulbringer uses a line-of-sight or fog-of-war system like Nox and Diablo, but Soulbringer's only allows you to see anything within a ten to twenty foot radius. Even in broad daylight and out of doors an inky pool surrounds you. There is no automap so you'll get lost often and combat involves getting peppered from the darkness by missile bearing monsters. Unfair!
Combat is fairly refreshing because it eschews the Diablo click-click-clickety-click model. Each weapon and attack has several different moves - thrust, slash, etcetetera, like a fighting game and you can string the moves into combos making combat in the game more about skill than invisible statistics and die rolls. Further, terrain is a factor; take the high ground and that downward thrust becomes all the more powerful, while facing upward you'll find you've lost the ability to use certain attacks effectively. Instead of having the enemy miss with their attacks, animations show parries, dodges and sidesteps. These grow more numerous as you gain in power. Like many games of this type, combat is constant and this system goes a long way to eliminate the boredom factor. Instead of health potions to regain lost hit points and heal damage, Soulbringer has you scarfing down Hams (and apples, potions sometimes too) which is kind of silly, especially if you would rather keep kosher.
Sadly, Soulbringer is ugly. I mean worse than good old 2D Diablo 2, and this is a fancy fully 3D accelerated title. The backgrounds are washed out and grainy, the animations are stilted and poor and that is a severe detriment in a genre that contains hand painted art like Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale, fast animations like Diablo II and Nox or full 3D wizardry like Darkstone. The game also falls prey to another “full 3D” problem. The non-fixed camera quivers and swings wildly when you don't want it to. Honestly, without a good camera system, isometric games need to stick with 2D and be done with it.
The character animation system will probably cause you to quit and hit uninstall, however. Animations are jerky, annoying, and just plain time consuming. Let's say you want to pick up an object: you have to click on the object, watch as your character walks (doesn't run) over to it, considers it for a while, then bends down to pick it up. It's such an arduous affair that it feels like it should have stirring music as accompaniment.
