Soul Knights, assemble!
Magic stones are sacred relics maintaining the balance of the world. One day, a bunch of bad guys stole the magic stones and the world descended into chaos. Can you take back the magic stones?
— The Intro
Soul Knight is a Run-and-Gun shooter that's also a Roguelike. It was developed by ChillyRoom for the Android and iOS platforms, and released on February 17th, 2017.
In the world this story inhabits, there are magic stones that maintain the balance of the world. One day, however, a bunch of bad guys steal these stones and the world consequently starts to fall into chaos. You goal is to get these stones back and save the world. In order to get each magic stone, you will need to reach the bottom of the dungeon.
The journey begins through a randomly generated dungeon, and you start out with a starter weapon that barely deals any damage. As you progress in the game, you will find various types of weapons, from generic firearms to over-the-top weapons. Being a Roguelike shooter, whenever you end the game and start over, you lose all your dungeon progress and weapons. Thankfully, though, you do keep the character upgrades and furniture boosts that are from the lobby.
The goal is to reach the bottom of the dungeon and recover the magic stone.
This work provides examples of:
- Ability Mixing: Many weapons can be merged with other weapons to create new ones that either inherit their properties or gain completely new ones.
- Boring, but Practical: The Hunter Bow is an excellent example of this. It's an uncommon (green) bow with a very fast charge time and a 50% crit rate, dealing 15 damage, and at the cost of only 2 energy. Especially when combined with other accuracy or damage buffs, it's enough to One-Hit Kill most basic Mooks and make short work of heavier enemies while holding its own against less powerful bosses.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Downplayed. While you can buy characters, skins, coins, a free revival voucher and a panda for it, it is mostly optional, and the game encourages players to actually play it to get a good weapon.
- Bullet Hell: The enemies in the game, if not carrying melee weapons, will try to cover the whole screen with bullets. Fortunately, you can slice the bullets with melee weapons found in the game.
- Exaggerated with Zulan the Colossus who has only two attacks that don't fill the screen with bullets... both of which use lasers instead.
- The Cameo: The Knight appears as a customer in ChillyRoom's other game, We Happy Restaurant.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Whenever you die on the field, you can revive yourself with gems, an in-game currency earned by completing all levels, ending the game by dying, watching daily commercials, daily login reward, or simply buying them with real money. However, you can only do it once for each walkthrough.
- Dem Bones: Skeletons appear as enemies in the Skeleton Kingdom. If you manage to defeat the Skeleton King without taking a hit, you will have a chance to get the Staff of Skeleton, which allows you to summon an army of skeletons against mobs and bosses all alike.
- Energy Weapon: You can find various types of laser guns. Some fire technicolor bullets, others fire a single beam, or several beams at once. Laser Fish, on the other hand, fires a laser beam from its mouth endlessly..
- The Meteo Laser Gun fires the biggest projectile in the game. With the laser buff, it gets even bigger than the corridors!
- Excuse Plot: A bunch of evildoers have appeared out of nowhere and stolen the crystals magically maintaining balance in the world. Now get into the dungeon and shoot things.
- Healing Boss: The Giant Crystal Crab, one of the first-stage bosses, deploys a version of this. It can retreat into its shell, during which any damage it receives will heal it instead.
- Joke Item: It does have its fair share of those, like the Bad Pistol and the Fish.
- Katanas Are Just Better: In addition to regular Katanas existing, the Crystal Crab Katana is a boss weapon obtained by defeating Giant Crystal Crab. It summons crystal pillars whenever you score a critical hit... which is way too often.
- And then the 40m Long Blade is the single biggest weapon in the game.
- Lethal Joke Item: You can occasionally come across weapons that don't even look like weapons. You can swing a chunk of meat, fire a rainbow or even shoot a laser beam from a fish.
- This is not counting the many meme-themed weapons, like the Emperor's New Gun.
- Yes, they are all good.
- Mana Meter: The energy bar serves as a Mana meter for various projectile-firing weapons, be it a staff, a bow, or a gun.
- More Dakka: The Bomber, a boss weapon acquired by defeating C6H8O6, can cover the whole screen with missiles after winding up for a few seconds.
- Weapons like the Staff of Thunder and the Deadly Frisbee could also count.
- One-Hit Kill: The One Punch is a rare fist weapon that can kill anything in one hit, including bosses. It's also very true to its name, you can only punch once. Afterward, it becomes a regular glove and can no longer kill anything in one hit.
- Regenerating Shield, Static Health: The armor meter regenerates overtime. Health, on the other hand, doesn't regenerate automatically.
- Parrying Bullets: Melee weapons can cut through bullets, allowing you to block them. There's also a randomized buff that allows you to deflect the bullets back at the sender.
- Rare Random Drop: Most high-end weapons are this, but each boss in the game has a specific legendary/red weapon themed after itself that it can drop at a low rate.
- Schizo Tech: The setting, and thus the technology in this game, is all over the place. You've got bows, swords, axes, magic users and supernatural monsters alongside guns, Energy Weapons, robots, aliens and Mini-Mecha.
- Shamu Fu: There are three fish-type weapons, allowing you to use a fish as a weapon.
- The regular Fish shoots a bubble that can penetrate enemies when fully charged.
- The Heavenly Sword is a frozen fish used as a melee weapon, it freezes enemies upon scoring a critical hit.
- The Laser Fish fires a laser beam from its mouth continuously, it also freezes enemies upon scoring a critical hit.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotguns fire multiple pellets at once, allowing one to clear multiple enemies or or direct them all of them at a boss. There's also a randomized buff that increases the amount of pellets fired as well as the Laser Shotgun, which fires several laser beams at once.
- In fact, every weapon that fires more than one bullet (with the exception of Jack and Mary and the Fine Machine Gun) is counted as a shotgun by the buff. This makes weapons like the Blind Missile Battery and almost every throwing weapon in the game extremely strong.
- Shout-Out: The fist weapon One Punch is named after Saitama from One-Punch Man, true to its namesake, it kills anything with just one punch.
- Starter Equipment: The Bad Pistol, a pistol that barely deals damage and doesn't cost any energy, is given as your default weapon.
- Until update 2.0.0 gave everyone except the knight a new starter weapon, and upgrades to said weapons.
- Sword Beam: Several melee weapons also fire bullets, though only the Caliburn is an actual sword.
- Symbol Swearing: The Verbal Fire launches these as its projectiles.
- This Is a Drill: There's the Armadillo, an oversized drill used as a close-quarters weapon. The Fusion Drill is (possibly) a futuristic mining tool which fires Frickin' Laser Beams.
- Turns Red: Every boss has the ability to do this at half health, buffing their attack patterns while making them start to No-Sell status effects.
