It’s been a long time since I came to a conclusion on a title as quickly as I have with Titan Souls. To be fair, I went in expecting it to be a bit of a steamy pile given its demonstrated need to rip off Shadow of the Colossus and Dark Souls, but I didn’t expect the design to be so staggeringly awful all-round. Proceedings aren’t helped by Acid Nerve’s complete failure to understand why either of the aforementioned games were good or interesting, but one thing’s for sure - they knew Dark Souls was in, and wanted a piece of that, hence the hilariously unoriginal title. Titan Souls misses all the points of Dark Souls that you’d expect it to: it has no story, which seems to be a popular, erroneous interpretation of Dark Souls’ obscure lore; it features exclusively one-on-one fights with bosses that are designed to be as difficult as possible; and it has a fairly sizeable world to explore, although they misinterpreted ‘exploration’ as ‘walking around and looking at bland scenery’, a problem easily solved by putting literally anything other than bosses in your game.

Honestly, this was never going to do well. I know I’m harping on about the Dark Souls train a lot, but it’s an easy comparison between very good and very bad design. Nowhere in Dark Souls will you find a boss that instantly one-shots you every time the fight begins with no telegraphing of the attack whatsoever. You’re given time to see what the enemy is and form your own expectations of what they’ll do. In Titan Souls you see some sort of statue and are forced to use your only attack to hit it and activate it, so you’re starting out each boss fight with no tools to attack. Nothing about the room you’re in or initial appearance of each enemy really tells you anything about what they’re going to do, so you go into every fight expecting that you’ll be squashed in two seconds flat and then spend the requisite 45-ish seconds walking back to the fight from the last checkpoint.

The checkpoint-to-boss bushwalk doesn’t contain any enemies, puzzles, or actual gameplay - it’s just the game using boredom as a punishment for death. This could be forgiven if the game had more going for it, but Titan Souls is comprised exclusively of these short-lived boss fights and the lengthy walk in between attempts. There is nothing going on in this game. This is a glaring shortcoming that should have been stripped out before development even properly began: somebody from Acid Nerve should have looked at the concept and this should have been the first thing mentioned and addressed right from the start. The moral of the story, as it were, is that people with no original ideas or real mind for game design should at least try to come up with an original idea, and then pass this idea to a studio with some actual talent behind it.

It’s been a long time since I came to a conclusion on a title as quickly as I have with [i]Titan Souls[/i]. To be fair, I went in expecting it to be a bit of a steamy pile given its demonstrated need to rip off [i]Shadow of the Colossus[/i] and [i]Dark Souls[/i], but I didn’t expect the design to be so staggeringly awful all-round. Proceedings aren’t helped by Acid Nerve’s complete failure to understand why either of the aforementioned games were good or interesting, but one thing’s for sure - they knew [i]Dark Souls[/i] was in, and wanted a piece of that, hence the hilariously unoriginal title. [i]Titan Souls[/i] misses all the points of [i]Dark Souls[/i] that you’d expect it to: it has no story, which seems to be a popular, erroneous interpretation of [i]Dark Souls[/i]’ obscure lore; it features exclusively one-on-one fights with bosses that are designed to be as difficult as possible; and it has a fairly sizeable world to explore, although they misinterpreted ‘exploration’ as ‘walking around and looking at bland scenery’, a problem easily solved by putting literally anything other than bosses in your game. Honestly, this was never going to do well. I know I’m harping on about the [i]Dark Souls[/i] train a lot, but it’s an easy comparison between very good and very bad design. Nowhere in [i]Dark Souls[/i] will you find a boss that instantly one-shots you every time the fight begins with no telegraphing of the attack whatsoever. You’re given time to see what the enemy is and form your own expectations of what they’ll do. In [i]Titan Souls[/i] you see some sort of statue and are forced to use your only attack to hit it and activate it, so you’re starting out each boss fight with no tools to attack. Nothing about the room you’re in or initial appearance of each enemy really tells you anything about what they’re going to do, so you go into every fight expecting that you’ll be squashed in two seconds flat and then spend the requisite 45-ish seconds walking back to the fight from the last checkpoint. The checkpoint-to-boss bushwalk doesn’t contain any enemies, puzzles, or actual gameplay - it’s just the game using boredom as a punishment for death. This could be forgiven if the game had more going for it, but [i]Titan Souls[/i] is comprised exclusively of these short-lived boss fights and the lengthy walk in between attempts. There is [i]nothing[/i] going on in this game. This is a glaring shortcoming that should have been stripped out before development even properly began: somebody from Acid Nerve should have looked at the concept and this should have been the first thing mentioned and addressed right from the start. The moral of the story, as it were, is that people with no original ideas or real mind for game design should at least [i]try[/i] to come up with an original idea, and then pass this idea to a studio with some actual talent behind it.