Salt and Sacrifice Reviews
Despite my minor complaints, Salt and Sacrifice is an insanely fun Souls-like featuring brutal challenges, great level designs, beautiful hand drawn graphics, interesting enemies and boss fights, cool gear to find and upgrade, a fun leveling system, and one of the most enjoyable co-op experiences I've had in quite a while. The fact that this game was designed by so few people and is of such high quality for a relatively low MSRP of $19.99 is nothing short of astounding. While not perfect, Salt and Sacrifice kept me entertained for well over 20 hours and made me excited for the next entry in this incredible series.
Salt and Sacrifice is bloody, brutal, and beyond enjoyable!
It's a shame, because so much of what's here is still so enjoyable. The combat is intense, challenging and varied, with a huge number of enemy types to battle against. You've got a ton of weapon options to tailor your build, and the capacity to level up seemingly hundreds of different stats in order to bring the fight to the Mages. It's just that those fights can be so unfair and one-sided due to the more random elements that can throw a spanner in the works. A brave attempt at something new, yes, but ultimately misguided.
Salt and Sacrifice is a game that can be frustrating for those who are not used to it, but it manages to be very fun, addictive and with a considerably high replay factor, thanks to New Game Plus. In the end, it is worth the investment for fans and for those looking for a 2D action RPG with a good duration.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
If Dark Souls was a 2D action role-playing game, I imagine it'd look and play similar to Salt and Sacrifice. And I mean that comparison to a tee because this game really does have it all: a fantastic story, interesting lore, creepy memorable worlds, visually arresting bosses and incredible gameplay variety and depth. Aside from a handful of frustrating difficulty spike moments this game was a total joy to play through and I'm already on a NG+ run and started my second character.
Salt and Sacrifice may not be as exciting as the first part, but it's definitely worth the experience, especially for Souls fans.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Salt And Sacrifice is every bit the sequel I could have wanted for Salt And Sanctuary. Everything about the gameplay has been elevated a polished better than any previous title from Ska Studios. With excellent combat, and a flexible progression system that lets you alter your build and playstyle how you like, mixed with amazing art, creature design, and atmosphere, this is the latest must-buy indie title.
Salt and Sacrifice to Salt and Sanctuary is like Dark Souls 2 to Dark Souls 1. It diverges a lot from the original, with some ideas that work well and some that don't. All in all, it's still an excellent 2-D Souls-like Metroidvania that brilliantly infuses Monster Hunter elements with challenging combat. Despite some poor design choices and questionable difficulty spikes, it's still astonishing to think this game was created by a team of just two people.
Every death feels fair, and the design philosophy is fine-tuned in such a way that feels intentional and deliberate. Salt and Sacrifice, on the other hand, achieves difficulty with clunky design, which completely misses the point of what makes a good challenge worth the time. Instead, the sacrifice of wasted time here is more than enough to make you salty.
Even though Salt and Sacrifice is a good game, many adjustments have been made that take away from the game's unique character while favoring more formulaic gameplay. It's a game that, in general, is enjoyable and entertaining, but its accomplishments are weighed down by several innovations that stay instead of contributing, giving the feeling that it has gone a step backward.
After thoroughly enjoying the greatness that is Salt and Sanctuary, Salt and Sacrifice is a somewhat disappointing experience. It's still a good game, though, and one that you'll be compelled to play until it starts to overstay its welcome about 10 hours in.
While the opening can be off-putting, Salt and Sacrifice is a huge game that picks up almost instantly once you're past the beginning, with multiple large areas that will each take a good amount of hours to explore and track down all the Mages that roam there.
I want to like Salt and Sacrifice, and in some stretches, I do. I enjoyed exploring the world, concepts of hunting and crafting, and the moody atmosphere, which kept me continuing for dozens of hours. But its clunky progression systems and many maddening enemy encounters quickly make the fun times easy to forget.
So does Salt and Sacrifice succeed in being an enjoyable experience? Absolutely, it does. The controls are responsive, there are many viable styles of play, the music is engaging, the sound effects are crunchy, and the animations are fun and stylized.
Salt & Sacrifice is a very challenging game and that may put off a lot of people. But these games are made with a very specific audience in mind. For fan, the sequel is a bigger and better version of the first game with a satisfying kill-die-repeat gameplay loop. It doesn’t make any compromises in quality and that is quite evident from the look of the game to how it play. If you’re someone who’s not put off by the challenge (that’s sometimes needless) and “immersive” Souls features, definitely give Salt & Sacrifice a try. It’s definitely worth one’s salt….hahaha…I’ll see myself out.
Salt and Sacrifice imbues its Souls-like formula with elements from Monster Hunter, creating a peculiar mixture that falls just short of realizing its full potential.
Salt and Sacrifice is a riff on what came before, but not an entirely successful one. A tense, fraught combat system with gallons of customisation options carries Ska Studios’ sequel, and boss fights are entertaining if overly tough at times, but the storytelling and narrative designs of Salt and Sanctuary can’t hold up their end of the bargain.
Rough, sometimes intriguing, sometimes frustrating: Salt and Sacrifice does its job, but it doesn't always go smoothly. The Mage hunting sequences are clever, but the pieces of the puzzle sometimes simply don't fit together.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Salt and Sacrifice is a bad combination of Souls like, Metroidvania and Monster Hunter, making it feel chaotic.
Review in Chinese | Read full review