The idea behind Mistfall Hunter sounds interesting on paper. What happens when the harsh, unforgiving world of extraction games collides with the punishing nature of the Soulslike genre? That simple question forms the foundation of Mistfall Hunter, with its developers attempting to create a world that brings together elements from two of today’s most popular genres. But does it manage to pull that off completely? Naturally, the answer is no.
Mistfall Hunter feels more like an experiment than a true blending of the two genres. It has creative ideas, but ultimately comes across as a process of trial and error—one that other developers could potentially learn from when creating better games in the future. Broadly speaking, Mistfall Hunter does capture the basic identity of both genres. The problem is that most of those elements feel superficial: attractive and convincing on the surface, but ultimately hollow underneath.
The reason is fairly straightforward. It’s almost as though the developers have honed in on the most immediately recognizable traits of Soulslikes and extraction games, missing the finer details that made the best titles in those genres so memorable in the first place.
Soulslike games typically feature an enormous variety of character builds, precise combat mechanics, challenging and diverse bosses, and richly detailed worlds. Mistfall Hunter, however, seems to have borrowed only the most superficial elements: relatively tough enemies, shortcuts that often feel pointless, bosses that are difficult for the sake of being difficult, and, of course, a stamina bar.
As a result, combat that is clearly meant to evoke the Soulslike formula quickly becomes painfully repetitive. Even worse, the game reveals its hand far too early. Within just a few minutes, it becomes easy to identify which abilities are excessively powerful, and repeatedly abusing those same moves is often enough to deal with most enemies—as well as other players in online encounters.
Things become even more frustrating if you approach Mistfall Hunter as an experienced Souls player and realize that there is no proper lock-on system. At first, that might not sound like a major problem. You might assume the developers compensate by having the camera naturally focus on nearby targets. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.
Instead, Mistfall Hunter gives you a tiny reticle in the center of the screen to manually line up your attacks. It is difficult to see and even harder to use effectively when encounters become crowded. The camera offers little assistance in tracking enemies, either. Even after spending hours with the game, you never really develop a comfortable rhythm for following enemy movements. If anything, wrestling with the disorienting camera is more likely to leave you with a headache than a better understanding of the combat.
Mistfall Hunter doesn’t tell us anything about world design, either. The visuals are nice and the art style is really great, but there’s little reason to truly explore the settings or use the many shortcuts placed throughout. And that’s largely because the extraction side of the experience suffers from the same problem: A pretty shell encasing an immature core.
The whole goal of getting into an extraction game is to find valuable loot, stuff that not only boost your fighting effectiveness, but also allow you to make important upgrades back at the main hub, making subsequent runs progressively easier. In my time with Mistfall Hunter, however, I rarely found anything significant from exploring the world. Most of what I found was basic, rather low quality stuff that could hardly keep me alive for more than a few runs.
The difficulty is that the best treasure in the game is usually related to big bosses, yet those fights are almost impossible to win solo with the gear you can reasonably get from normal exploration. This results in a weird circle of progression, exploring is supposed to prep you for the game’s major difficulties but the rewards it gives just aren’t good enough to do that.
This means Mistfall Hunter gradually locks you into a tiring grind treadmill where you are forced to travel through its environments in the hopes that an elite enemy will finally drop a weapon worth having. All of this makes for a progressively tedious experience in Mistfall Hunter. What’s more troubling is that the developers still don’t have any clear intentions on how to improve the game, or have offered any realistic vision for the future of this live-service project. If things continue down the same path it’s hard to imagine the game’s servers sticking around for the long haul.
Mistfall Hunter is an average game in the end. If you’re lucky enough to have a group of three buddies to jump in together, then there are definitely a few hours of fun to be had. But eventually the badly planned setting, monotonous fighting, lack of any meaningful feeling of exploration and brutally powerful enemies that can’t reasonably be handled with ordinary gear begin to wear you down. Eventually frustration turns to tiredness, and you might walk away from the game altogether.
This review is based on the PS5 version
Score: 50/100
