3/5 ★ – vr_'s review of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers.

I wish the first 3 SMT games were more like this gameplay and map navigation wise. Even though I am still not a fan of the grid based combat from this and if..., It definitely was way less annoying here, and combat was relatively enjoyable. Press-turn is just so good that it feels hard going back. Of the first-person dungeon crawler SMT games, I can easily say this was the most fun and least tedious. Even though I preferred the combat style in SMT II (no positioning), Soul Hackers has some great QOL features, such as a cleaner UI, better item organization, and item / skill descriptions, that make combat way less frustrating. Unlike the SNES era games, Soul Hackers was also pretty clear on where to go next, so I never had to resort to a guide. Plot wise This has some cool ideas, but ultimately tells quite a non existent story. Nothing is really explained nor does the enemy factions goals / motivation really make sense. However the journey itself was pretty interesting, and the dungeons were cool and well designed, so I didn’t really care too much. It didn;t really matter WHY I was doing something, I was just happy that WHAT I was doing was interesting. Out of the 7 prior SMT games I have played, this probably reminded me of IV Apocalypse the most, probably due to the amount of dialogue and VN style cutscenes with party members. While the characters are relatively one dimensional, and not really anything amazing, they aren’t annoying like in IV Apocalypse, so at least I was never rolling my eyes. I think this is a game that has some really cool elements, but as a whole is just somewhat mid. It didn't overstay its welcome, and it did have some good improvements over the SNES era games. It also had some of the most engaging and fun demon negotiation conversations from recent memory, so that's also a plus. Totally alright, nothing mind-blowing, but engaging enough and really not tedious.