Soul Hackers 2: Atlus' Persona-lite is an intriguing game with basic visuals and technical issues. digitalfoundry takes a look.
What's the longest you've ever waited for a video game sequel? Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was released all the way back in 1997 on the Sega Saturn, a first-person dungeon crawler JRPG made by developer Atlus. Four console generations later we finally have a sequel - Soul Hackers 2 - though it's really a standalone game with mostly thematic connections to the original.
However, the environments really expose the rendering weaknesses. Eighth-gen staples like physically-based materials, global illumination and screen-space reflections seem to be entirely absent - but that's just the start. All of the environmental lighting seems to be baked, and doesn't affect shadow-casting at all. The geometry budget is quite limited, which produces chunky-looking curved surfaces. Texture resolution is questionable, and there's minimal texture variety.
Image quality is, perhaps not surprisingly, behind the curve as well. There's no anti-aliasing whatsoever. The relative lack of geometry ironically helps a bit here, minimising visible aliasing in some scenes. Still, expect a shimmery presentation. Even high resolutions don't fix the problem. PS5 and Series X both offer graphics and performance modes, which are essentially the same thing, with one running at full 4K resolution with a 30fps cap, and the other at 1800p60.
Series X doesn't fare nearly as well with this option. The brief dips during combat return but the game really struggles in certain city areas, dropping into the 40s and 50s for extended periods. Certain cutscenes see prolonged performance dips as well. The combat issues are understandable, but the other problems don't make as much sense. Series S plays out much the same, even with its drastically reduced pixel count.
Xbox also struggles on last-gen machines. The One S version is extremely rough and while One X runs at 4K, performance is not great. It's the 1080p-focused PS4 and especially PS4 Pro that work out best.
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