| Mortal Shell 2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Mortal Shell 2 is a soulslike that features a unique Shell system that replaces the standard RPG class system. Read on to see what it did well, where it failed, and our review of the game
Overview
What is Mortal Shell 2?
In Mortal Shell 2, you play as the Harbinger, a prophesied being destined to reclaim the stolen Ova of the sacred Undermether from terrifying creatures that fiercely protect her unborn. Possess fallen Warrior Shells, each with unique abilities, and engage in brutal, high-stakes combat as you challenge false gods and attempt to redeem a world left in ruins.
Explore an interconnected open world filled with twisted landscapes, forgotten structures, and hidden secrets. As you progress, uncover the lost memories of your shells and evolve your combat style to survive the horrors that await.
Mortal Shell 2 features:
⚫︎ Unique class system
⚫︎ Open world exploration
⚫︎ Eight main weapons
⚫︎ Eight side firearms
⚫︎ Hidden dungeons and side quests
⚫︎ Side stories connected to the main cast
 Steam |
 PSN |
 Xbox |
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| Price | $49.99 | ||||
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Mortal Shell 2 Review: Very Fun and Beautifully Horrific, Without Much Story to Tell
Now With More Body Horror
The great thing about Soulslikes is that dying is part of the experience. You get beaten into the ground, figure out what went wrong, and eventually get that sweet victory cry that probably shouldn't be shouted toward the ceiling. Whether that last part is just me is unimportant. What matters is that Mortal Shell 2 feels strangely designed to cut that death count in half.
To put it simply, Mortal Shell 2 is a soulslike about running around an open world collecting eggs. That's really the gist of it, though stopping there would massively undersell its horrific world and stranger ideas. Chief among them are its Shells: a replacement for the traditional RPG class system that also doubles as a second health bar.
And they're fantastic. The Shell system is one of the game's most thoughtfully designed mechanics, offering distinct playstyles and plenty of room for mistakes. Unfortunately, Mortal Shell 2 often feels like it put the same level of care into little else, despite the high overall quality. Its decision to remove stamina, for instance, should have made combat faster and more aggressive, but the way enemies were designed to compensate instead turns many encounters into tests of patience, especially if you really want to avoid another trip down the beaten path.
Really, Mortal Shell 2 gets a lot of its individual pieces right. I've had insane amounts of fun playing the game. It's just that there are a bunch of nitpicks that do drag the collective gameplay experience down from a great
to a much more reasonable good.
A Story About Collecting Eggs
Mortal Shell 2’s story is about collecting the stolen Ova from the Undermether as its chosen Harbinger. And yes, the Ova are quite literally eggs, taken from the Undermether’s massive womb and capable of mutating into terrifying creatures. Unfortunately, that’s about as much as I can say without downright spoiling the important parts of the story.
Why? Because there really isn’t much story to begin with. I wouldn’t fault you for playing the game and forgetting that a story even existed halfway through. The setting is there primarily to provide context for your journey and flesh out its world, rather than to give you a narrative that constantly moves forward.
Yes, there are story cutscenes for every boss, too, but for the most part they're just a brief on why you're there to whack them on the head.
The stories behind each Shell, though—heroes who have died and whose corpses you can inhabit—help fill that void. But for the most part, they aren’t complete without reading journals scattered throughout the game, and even then, you have to upgrade each Shell to unlock more of its story.
Where Mortal Shell 2 really excels, however, is in its environmental storytelling. It does an incredible job of making you understand what kind of world you’re actually living in. And honestly, even if you’re someone who dreams of living in a soulslike (isekai fans, rise up), you’re probably not going to want to choose this one.
It’s Actually Scary to Live Here
Mortal Shell 2, for the lack of a better phrase, looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous—and by gorgeous, I mean horrifying. I mean, it shouldn’t look “gorgeous” in the literal sense when its main themes revolve around body horror, right?
It sticks to that theme exceptionally well. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the most visually horrifying soulslikes on the market. Despite lacking much in the way of atmospheric variety (the weather’s just fog, fog, and more fog, for example), it more than makes up for it with everything else.
Seriously, every corner looks dreadful. The world constantly makes you question the sanity of the civilization that built it and the people who somehow managed to live there. The architecture also looks genuinely lived-in and functional, as if you’re walking through the ruins of a real civilization that has forgotten proper morals rather than simply traversing a series of video game levels.
And even the scant remnants of civilization only make things worse. An active black market or a functioning tavern full of drunks should make the world feel more alive right? Yet somehow they only reinforce how miserable this world is. These people aren't merely surviving in the apocalypse; they've somehow managed to turn the apocalypse into a half-functioning society.
Simply existing in this world is enough to create a sense of foreboding, and the audio does a fantastic job of reinforcing it.
The voice acting is just excellent, pure and simple. And regardless of whether a character is being solemn, angry, desperate, or downright unhinged (like the dude at the main base with a foot fetish), they all fit the setting's underlying feeling that there's very little hope left for anyone. Combat sounds are equally punchy, too, while the enemies themselves make all sorts of dreadful noises that make even relatively mundane encounters sound deeply unpleasant.
The use of silence is a little more inconsistent, though. There are moments where stripping away the music works brilliantly, leaving you alone with the environment and making the world feel even more isolating. Other times, however, the silence feels less deliberate and more like the volume had just been turned down too much.
Even with that caveat, Mortal Shell 2's audiovisual presentation does an incredible job of making its world feel as bleak and horrifying as it looks. It doesn't just show you a dying world; it makes you hear what living in one sounds like.
Undead Die Twice
Shells aren’t just walking pay-per-view storybooks that look like corpse suits, however. They’re also what functions as the game’s class system, influencing your stats, skills, passive abilities, and fighting styles depending on which one you inhabit.
But the first really cool thing about having Shells is how they’re a functional first health bar. That is, if you take lethal damage, you shed your Shell and turn back into your, uhh, naked self. At least you’re still alive! You can then regain your Shell by clobbering things with your primary weapon until you can wear it again. This is effectively a Last Stand perk that can bring you back to near full capabilities with enough skill. However, it’s hard to abuse given that the number of hits required to regain your Shell increases the more you die between checkpoints.
Though that does not stop the game from becoming easier because of it.
The difference between each shell is quite massive, too, even between those that share similar playstyles. For example, both Smert and Genessa both have builds that let them thrive when they’re near-death. However, Smert avoids death by having a chance of healing himself instead of getting damaged. Meanwhile, Genessa is simply unkillable within a number of hits while her active skill is on, in exchange for just outright dying when she takes lethal damage.
That small difference alone creates a massive divergence in how both are played, with Smert allowing for generally more freedom while Genessa is afforded short windows where she can be recklessly used. It also dictates what weapons they could use most effectively, what accessories should be equipped on them, and all the usual implications.
Mortal Shell 2’s trademark system is, ultimately, the foundation everything else is built around. And fortunately, this system itself is nearly spotless—besides a minor quality-of-life hiccup. That is, you have to manually remove skill points from one Shell before putting them into another, despite only being able to use one Shell at a time. Unfortunately, however, the same can’t be said for the main gameplay change they implemented to differentiate it from its peers.
The Untiring Husk
For the most part, Mortal Shell 2 doesn’t stray too far from the standard-issue soulslike toolkit. You’ve got normal and heavy attacks, skills, a secondary ranged weapon, and the usual guard, parry, dodge, and heal options.
Unlike most soulslikes (unsoulslike?), however, Mortal Shell 2 has no stamina bar to babysit. And they don’t even try to replace it with something else like AI LIMIT’s Sync Rate. The entire concept of managing a stamina-like meter during combat has simply been thrown out the window. Health, mana, and guard still exist, obviously, but otherwise, your character has basically forgotten what fatigue is.
Instead, that burden gets dumped onto the enemy, who now has both an invisible Stagger meter and a visible Break meter to worry about.
The effects are pretty intuitive. Maxing out Stagger interrupts whatever an enemy is doing, even mid-attack. Break, meanwhile, stuns them for much longer and leaves them open to a riposte that deals some very rude amounts of damage.
Anyway, breaking away from the physical limits of a functioning biological body means that Mortal Shell 2’s combat is very fast-paced by design. This is most obvious from how one of your available parrying methods involves simply turning your body into stone, regardless of whatever you’re doing when you press the appropriate button. And if you time it right, your guard gauge won’t drain at all. Ergo, you can dive into an angry mob, start chopping them up, and harden just before their attacks hit. If you’re skilled enough, you can keep doing this and mow through the angry crowd without ever getting damaged.
It’s a very cool design that supports the power fantasy of “1 vs 100” really well.
Stagger and Break complement this experience, too. They give the combat some moment-to-moment variety, letting your attacks interrupt enemies, throw them back, and occasionally pick someone out from the group for a very personal beatdown.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it ends up working more often than not.
Speeding Past the Sweet Spot
Of course, the game isn’t going to let you brutalize enemies one-sidedly just because being dead means you can ignore fatigue. In exchange for your ability to endlessly run around the map, dodge through attacks, and spam the attack button, enemies—especially regular mobs—get a number of buffs to keep up with your newfound freedom.
The first, and perhaps most noticeable, is absurd forward momentum on enemy attacks. Their swings carry them toward you far more than you’d normally expect, allowing enemies to cover a frankly unreasonable amount of ground just by swinging their arms.
This gets particularly nasty when you run out of space. Enemies can shove you against walls—or even down cliffs—turning Mortal Shell 2’s supposedly open-world stages, with their narrow passages and frequent ledges, into death traps. Best case, you lose the option of dodging and have to parry or retaliate. Worst case, you fall to your death.
And then there’s also their egregiously long attack combos. This is likely meant to compensate for your ability to spam dodge rolls while encouraging parrying and the Stagger and Break systems, but almost every enemy that doesn’t get one-shot by a stray arrow can unleash a frankly shocking three to five attacks in quick succession, turning what looks like a single swing into an entire fighting game exhibition.
That’s manageable against one or two enemies. Unfortunately, group encounters almost always throw at least three at you, meaning that even when you play into the supposed Mortal Shell 2 power fantasy—running straight in and parrying every attack—you can end up doing little more than strafing around while waiting for them to stop attacking. And with too little healing to safely brute-force your way through thanks to the easily missable upgrades late in the game, the end result is less a power fantasy and more stamina management converted into time management. Even bosses can become comparative cakewalks simply because there are fewer bodies on the field.
Build Diversification is Part of the Challenge
Honestly, getting bullied by mobs despite being able to easily slap bosses around can still be fun if you have the freedom to experiment with different Shells, or rather, classes, and weapons to deal with them. Instead, however, Mortal Shell 2 makes trying to explore options and diversify builds an actual pain in the neck.
See, every single facet of making builds in this game comes with a price tag in gold and a handful of materials. Gold is Mortal Shell 2’s main currency, which is thankfully not the same one you use to level up (hooray for a working economy). As you upgrade your gear, the gold cost steadily increases. Your income, however, doesn't scale with it fast enough, especially on a straightforward playthrough of the story. And by the time you find the rest of the game’s very limited number of weapons and firearms, you may have already invested a lot of gold upgrading the older ones and not have the resources to properly give those a spin.
Of course, there’s a refund functionality that you can unlock as you assemble more of the game’s equivalent of a blacksmith’s smithy. It only refunds the materials invested in a weapon, though; gold is technically infinite anyway. But here’s the catch: the parts you need to unlock smithy functionality aren’t required for progression and can be missed (though they can be returned to).
If this is their way of encouraging players to explore the world, then it makes sense. Getting better gear and more build options is an effective way to force players to move their legs and step into the unknown. However, locking weapon respec functionality behind optional exploration is a bad idea when the game already has such a limited selection of weapons, firearms, and trinkets, on top of the terrible gold income. What if I didn't want to look for guides? In essence, Mortal Shell 2’s build diversification is half a completionist privilege.
In fact, the resource issues also hits Shells, only worse. Though they aren’t limited by gold costs, the main material to upgrade them and unlock higher-tier abilities is limited in number and can only be obtained at specific locations. That means the more you invest in them, the more you have to squeeze the map out of its progressively decreasing resources in order to keep doing so.
And no, you can’t respec the materials that you’ve invested in Shells, unlike their skill points.
Is Mortal Shell 2 Worth It?
It’s a great game, all things considered
Mortal Shell 2 is the kind of game that will really make you think about your priorities. Its best qualities shine brightest if you're willing to pick a build you like and bulldoze your way through the game's problems with it. And honestly, the only reason why it didn't get a higher score here is due to getting nerfed by the very bare story, which isn't actually a problem if you're far more interested in the gameplay and action immersion.
Ultimately, I’d narrow the question down to one thing: how much do you value the moment-to-moment combat? If that’s what you care about most, Mortal Shell 2 is easily worth its price tag. Buy it; don't even hesitate. If you’re looking for a more complete RPG experience, I’d recommend wishlisting it and coming back when your wallet’s a little fatter.
Game8 Reviews
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