Mortal Shell II

I have only had about a day with Mortal Shell II so far, which normally would make me hesitant to score something this large. The advantage here is that reviews and community impressions are arriving at the same time, and what I have played lines up pretty well with the bigger picture forming around it. This is a massive improvement over the original Mortal Shell. The first game had good ideas but always felt like a smaller studio trying to build its own Dark Souls. Harden was clever. Taking over different Shells was interesting. The atmosphere was strong. The problem was that movement and combat could feel stiff enough that appreciating those ideas required putting up with quite a bit of friction. Mortal Shell II feels much more confident about what it wants to be. The biggest difference is combat. There is no traditional stamina bar constantly telling you when you are allowed to attack or dodge. You can stay aggressive for much longer and focus on positioning, posture, parries and weapon abilities instead. That immediately makes fights feel faster without turning the game into some mindless hack-and-slash. Weapons have real weight behind them and the executions are brutal. Cold Symmetry clearly wanted hitting something to feel nasty this time around. Successful parries and critical attacks can turn into elaborate finishers that send limbs flying or leave whatever you were fighting in pieces. For an M-rated dark fantasy game it absolutely earns that rating. The Shell system is still what gives Mortal Shell its own identity. Instead of creating one traditional character and slowly adjusting a few stats, you possess different bodies with their own strengths and skill trees. Eight playable Shells give you enough room to find something that fits how you actually want to fight. Some favor heavier defense while others are better suited to mobility or more unusual abilities. Switching your approach feels much more meaningful than changing armor because a number went up. That flexibility also helps make Mortal Shell II more approachable than some Soulslikes without making it easy. You can absolutely wander somewhere you are not prepared for and get destroyed. The larger open world gives you much more freedom than the first game and does not constantly stop you from walking directly into an area that wants nothing to do with your current power level. At the same time, exploring properly usually gives you enough upgrades and tools to smooth out some of those difficulty spikes. Exploration may actually be the biggest surprise. Mortal Shell II is much larger than the original and the world is not simply empty space between bosses. There are dungeons, hidden paths, strange buildings, puzzles and areas that are easy to miss if you are only following whatever looks like the main route. Finding something usually feels useful too. I have much more patience for exploring when the reward is an actual weapon or upgrade instead of another crafting material I already have 400 of. The world itself looks great. Mortal Shell has always leaned into bleak fantasy, but the sequel has much more variety than endless gray ruins. Forests, castles, settlements and increasingly strange environments help stop everything from blending together. Lighting and environmental design do a lot of the work even when some individual character models or animations do not look quite as expensive as the biggest games in the genre. Story is harder to praise as confidently. Mortal Shell II gives you more narrative than the first game but still enjoys being vague. You are the Harbinger moving through a corrupted world and possessing the dead while searching for sacred eggs for a creature known as Mother. There is much more happening around that setup, but the game expects you to pay attention and piece parts of it together yourself. Some people are going to love that. Casual players who just want somebody to explain what the hell is happening may not. There are also enough rough edges that I do not want early hype pushing the score into the 9s yet. The camera can become annoying in tighter fights. Performance has not been flawless across every version. A few abilities and upgrades seem powerful enough that balance may need another pass once thousands of players start breaking the game in ways the developers never expected. Weapon variety is another place where bigger does not necessarily mean endless. The weapons that are here have deeper upgrade options and much stronger identities than before, but players expecting the huge arsenal of something like Elden Ring may be surprised by how carefully Mortal Shell II limits what you find. I actually think that works better for this game. Finding a new weapon feels important because they are not dropping every thirty seconds. The $49.99 price helps too. We have reached a point where major games routinely ask for $70 or more before anybody has even opened the cosmetic store. Mortal Shell II is offering a much larger game than its predecessor while staying below that line. Assuming the second half holds up to what people reviewing the full game are reporting, there is plenty here for the money. After spending my first day with it, 8.5 feels like the right place to start. The important word there is start. The combat is strong enough to keep me playing. The Shell system gives it a reason to exist beyond being another Soulslike. Exploration is much better than I expected and early reviewers who have already finished the game are largely confirming that the quality continues well beyond the opening hours. There are still bugs, balance questions and some familiar roughness keeping me from treating it like an instant classic. But if you played the original Mortal Shell and thought there was a much better game hiding inside those ideas, Mortal Shell II looks like the game Cold Symmetry was trying to make the first time.