Dolmen in the test with video: The worst Souls-like ever?

You are probably familiar with this problem: month after month, countless games are vying for your attention, each one more interesting than the next, and the pile of shame is constantly growing. Even fans of Souls-like are now overwhelmed with so many titles that they sometimes hardly know where to start. Luckily there are still games like Dolmen! Because the first major project by the Brazilian Massive Work Studios has turned out to be such a horrible hodgepodge that nobody should really consider taking a closer look at it.

Martians invasion in 360p

You already notice during the intro cutscene that you are dealing with a production that was apparently created with a budget of a few sandwiches: Dolmen tries you with low resolution and lots of compression artifacts (buy now €39.99) to tell the story of a mining planet invaded by an alien alien species. If it’s not enough for you that the NPCs and enemies in the game look like the first few results of a Google image search for “Generic Alien” and “Alien Bug”, the alarm bells should go off at the latest when the word “mining planet” is heard. Sounds about as exciting as “The Land of Sewer Levels” or “The Factory Floor Universe”? It is the same.

The pixelated intro and compression artifacts bode well at the outset – and the game doesn’t get any better over time.

Source: PC Games

Because the game completely ran out of ideas towards the end, it just throws hordes of clone opponents in front of you.

Source: PC Games

As a chosen guy in generic sci-fi armor, you’re given one of four starting classes to choose from and then sent to the planet Revion Prime. There are tons of tunnels and corridors to explore here which, I have to give the game that, look extremely boring, but are at least occasionally linked by unlockable shortcuts. In the first few hours of play, something like playing fun shimmers through the loveless, amateurish presentation. This is mainly because Dolmen is Souls-like, and the core gameplay can still be motivating.

The calm before the shitstorm

The use of firearms is rarely required, but at least they can be used fluently. However, the hit feedback leaves a lot to be desired.

Source: PC Games

The scaffolding of fighting, pounding, leveling, and exploring still holds up for a while, even if the struts are made of sodden cardboard. For example, while combat feels choppy and lifeless thanks to choppy animations, earlier genre peers like Lords of the Fallen have done it worse.

When it comes to combining close and long-range combat, the otherwise shamelessly copied game also has a nice, unique idea up its sleeve: in addition to swords and axes, Dolmen provides you with a manageable pool of firearms that you fire with your blue energy bar. The highlight: You also use this bar to heal yourself and to start your armor’s reactor, which lets you deal out shock waves and elemental damage for a short time.

Better stolen badly than… wait a minute!

If you hit the right opponent with one of the three elements, he will receive a debuff that lowers his defense. This could make for an interesting trade-off between healing and attack power in theory, but in practice the guns are too weak and the enemies too narrow and simple to warrant such tactics.

Replacing the reactor or the gun quickly in battle, or making a new shooting club with the materials you have collected, is also a test of patience due to the horribly designed user interface. The mere fact that you often have to double and triple check which button you actually selected makes the interface practically unusable. Not to mention that an average student could probably design prettier menus using PowerPoint.

Dolmen on every corner looks like you let a robot play Dark Souls and Returnal for two hours and then sent it to the sci-fi department of the Unreal Asset Store with 150 euros in the account. The fact that the checkpoint machines, which refill your energy potions and let all enemies respawn, are crudely referred to as “beacons” is just the tip of the iceberg here. In addition to pixelated, oddly cropped artwork, the loading screens also contain useful tips such as “Pay attention to your surroundings. They can kill you.”

Tell me, Jonas, what are we going to call this alien now?

The only NPCs you can talk to are the aforementioned Martians, who adorn the game with thematically appropriate names like “Jonas” or “Nicole”. We haven’t found the miner aliens Günther and Sören, but we do know the only sentence they could say to us: “Thank you. Please accept this.” What are we even rewarded for? That remains as obscure as the rest of the remarkably uninteresting story we learn in loveless text boxes from all sorts of dead Jonassen and Nicoles.
Let’s continue on page 2!