Soulfire

I want to like this one more than I probably should, because the pitch is genuinely interesting: take the dodge-roll-and-punish loop you know from Souls-adjacent brawlers, compress it into a 2.5D side-scroller, then throw 60 players across 20 three-person teams into the same dungeon and let chaos sort it out. Rounds cap at 20 minutes, the map is split into 12 zones with a shrinking safe area, and you drop in with nothing - weapons, armor, and props all looted from chests and barrels scattered through the levels. On paper that is a tighter, more mechanical take on the genre than the usual third-person open-field stuff. The combat toolkit is wider than the visuals suggest. There are melee combos, backstabs, throws, and execution animations that can be customized separately from your gear skin. Spell scrolls add a layer on top - area-of-effect nukes, stealth options, health bumps - and landing one at the right moment can flip a three-way fight entirely. Arenas are layered vertically, so you can drop down on opponents or climb to higher ground, and hiding in barrels for ambushes is an actual viable tactic until someone runs a Hunter's Mark item and pulls you out. The free combat mode (six players, unlimited respawns) is a cleaner way to learn the timing before you commit to the full battle royale format. On that front the core feel is solid - hitboxes read correctly for a side-scroller, animations are clear enough to react to, and the dodge window is tight but fair. Here is where I have to be straight with you. By most accounts this game hit a population wall very quickly after launch, and community reports suggest it has been running largely on bots since not long after release. That is the single most important fact about Soulfire in 2025. Every design strength - the multi-layer arenas, the scroll economy, the team coordination required in three-versus-three scraps - evaporates the moment you are not playing against real people with real reads. Bots in this game are serviceable for getting reps in, but they do not pressure you on the dodge timing or coordinate scroll usage, so the skill loop never tightens. Netcode concerns were raised in the community early on, with reports of unhittable players in some sessions, and the developer has released a separate follow-up title, Soulfire: Weapon Master, that reportedly rewrote much of the underlying code to address performance issues. That context matters when evaluating the base game. If you have three friends who will commit to this together and treat it as a private novelty - a weird, charming side-scrolling BR with real mechanical depth underneath the low player count - there are hours of genuine fun here. Solo queuing into a bot-filled lobby in the hope of a ranked ladder experience that tests your movement and gear decisions is not what this game delivers right now. The concept deserved a bigger audience than it got.

Fred · Scout Team

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