Solasta II Demo Impression
The previous game has already proven the developer more than adept at working with the ruleset, and the demo promises that there will be plenty of interesting encounters ahead for players to face.
While Baldur’s Gate III was the obvious big winner of a resurgence in cRPGs in the past few years, a number of other titles also met with success. One of the more surprising was fellow Dungeons and Dragons-connected title, Tactical Adventures’s Solasta: Crown of the Magister, which provided a strong adventure with a focus on the combat of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. That game’s success allowed the developer to build upon it with follow-up Solasta II, and RPGamer was able to check out an early demo of the game — available publicly during next week’s Steam Next Fest — which shows plenty of promise ahead of its planned Steam Early Access release later this year.
Like its predecessor, Solasta II sees players creating a party of four adventurers in its original world on the continent of Neokos, although the two-hour demo version featured a decently balanced pre-created party of level three characters. A separate tale to the previous game, though set in the same world, it allows players to jump into the new adventure easily, with the party made up of four orphans who have been adopted into the same family and sent out to make a name for themselves. The demo sees them reaching the home of a friend they made previously, where they need to find a missing person and investigating mysterious rumblings in the land.
Solasta II keeps up with the strong amount of verticality in the first game.
The demo offers a decent slice of the game and does a decent job showing what it’s all about. The actual area shown is decently sized but still appropriately compact, and although ultimately linear in nature, it hides that linearity well through the design, which features layers of verticality and winding paths that make exploring through it and seeing what lies ahead interesting. The quest design gives players solid direction and impetus on its progress, with the main quest accompanied by a couple of short optional quests that requires a bit of added exploration on top of it. It shows different ways quests can be completed; an encounter with kobolds can result in an easier peaceful outcome if one of the party members is able to stealthily retrieve a dragon scale before meeting them, and how players deal with them can impact a future fight. The developer stated that it is looking to apply some of the lessons it learned creating the previous game’s DLC to make Solasta II less of a linear adventure and provide more branches in conversations. However, players should note that the developers have actively designed the game around a party of heroes, so the Baldur’s Gate-style evil playthrough is unlikely to be a full path.
As in the first game, Solasta II is built on the SRD 5e ruleset, which covers character builds, equipment, combat, and various skill checks across the game. The game simplifies a few things — all conversations are held with the party in full regardless of which character might initiate it — but otherwise the implementation looks very strong and makes it easy to follow where checks are being used. Conversations are largely about gathering information before offering the options to take a path that generally involves a skill check as part of it. The game feature a flexible control scheme, allowing for both direct movement (including with a gamepad) or cursor-lead controls, as well as options like a “helpful dice” toggle that help prevent a bad run of rolls.
The demo provides a small selection of battles and doesn’t challenge the player too much, but does a good job of demonstrating the developer’s ability to use the environments and enemies to create varied scenarios. The final battle in the slice gives players an interesting balance between having to defeat enemies while dealing with managing both a semi-timed threat and environmental danger. The previous game has already proven the developer more than adept at working with the ruleset, and the demo promises that there will be plenty of interesting encounters ahead for players to face. There are also a host of minor improvements to elements like inventory management and pathfinding.
The faithful implementation of D&D 5e combat looks likely to complemented by strong encoutner designs.
One area Tactical Adventures has focused on improving in Solasta II is the graphics; the demo shows a major upgrade in both the character models and the environments of the game, which definitely help convey a sense of life in the world. The UI has also been given a revamp from the first Solasta, and it strikes a good balance of being unobtrusive while still conveying all of the necessary information to players. While the demo is not yet optimised for Steam Deck, the developer intends the game to be a strong fit for it. Voice acing is largely strong and another area of improvement on the previous title, especially on those tailored to the NPCs, and it’s appreciable that the customised party is fully voiced in conversations as well, though like the previous game, the general voices and conversation for the protagonist party doesn’t quite gel as much.
Solasta II is very much building on the solid base that the first game crafted, and appears to be doing so to very good effect. Tactical Adventures’s long-running support of the previous game — through the addition of console versions, multipalyer, and a dungeon creator — also holds it in good standing and players should be able to expect plenty of updates and additions as it goes through the Early Access process. Those looking for a new cRPG to check out in future should absolutely keep Solasta II on their radar.
Disclosure: This article is based on an early demo build of the game provided by the publisher.
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