Lost Soul Aside

Lost Soul Aside is a flawed but occasionally brilliant action game that represents both the potential and the pitfalls of passion-driven game development. What Yang Bing and his team at Ultizero Games have accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary, because the core combat system genuinely delivers the kind of stylish, skill-based action that genre fans crave. However, another year of development to smooth out the rough edges might have allowed this game to live up to its sky-high expecta...

Lost Soul Aside left a bitter aftertaste of hype seasoned with unmet expectations. It's one of the few RPGs that made me care less about its characters and story the more I played, due to its shoddy narrative and half-baked cutscenes. The gameplay is excellent, offering plenty of versatility for everyone and depth. The post-game challenges will undoubtedly please those wanting to test their hack and slash proficiency. That is, however, if they have the grit and tolerance to see the game through to the end.

Despite a deep and enjoyable combat system, there are a few issues that hold Lost Soul Aside back from being a great action-RPG title.

Lost Soul Aside has the foundations of a great action game with strong combat, but those strengths are buried beneath an inconsequential story and noticeable polish issues.

A dazzling spectacle of combat and style struggling to balance substance with shine.

After nearly ten years in development, Lost Soul Aside has finally arrived on PlayStation 5 and PC. This debut title from Ultizero Games began as a solo project by developer Bing Yang and eventually grew into something much larger. With such a long development cycle and support from Sony’s PlayStation China Hero Project, expectations were naturally high. Our review covers the game’s story, technical polish, combat system, and RPG elements to help you decide if this action game is worth yo...

Finally getting to play a game that you've been waiting on for years can be a daunting experience. Expectations can shift significantly in that amount of time depending on marketing, previews, and the project's own development cycle.

Lost Soul Aside almost nails its combat, but unlikable characters, bloated RPG elements, and a generic setting make it a chore to get through.

There's no getting around the fact that Lost Soul Aside feels like it belongs in the mid 2010s and honestly that would be fine were it not the fact that the game feels so compromised in so many other aspects of its design that it's difficult to shake the feeling that it just feels outdated, rather than a heartfelt love letter to the past. Though the soundtrack is frequently excellent and the combat reliably exciting, neither are enough to save Lost Soul Aside from tumbling into a deep abyss of rank mediocrity, which is a shame; especially considering the sheer amount of graft that has gone int...

Lost Soul Aside wore on me pretty quickly, with its repetitive arena-to-arena flow, characters I never spent enough time to care about or what happened to them, and unpolished issues and quirks. Sometimes being "cool" just doesn’t cut it.

The most damning critique I can make of Lost Soul Aside is that I couldn’t wait for it to be over. While the combat does occasionally shine, the poorly constructed narrative, terrible cinematography, and levels that drag on for the sake of having a longer game. While the technical performance was better than expected, Lost Soul Aside is still fairly buggy, and a stable frame rate can’t make this an enjoyable experience.

Lost Soul Aside is an action-adventure RPG that had a troubled development. That becomes obvious when you start playing. It's an upoptimized mess, with a story that actively annoyed me, and gameplay that got boring and repetitive. The game just takes from others in the genre that inspire it, with no idea how to make it work. The end result is a disappointing game I can't recommend to even the most curious of players.