Mortal Shell II cuts the formula loose and becomes one of the year's best soulslikes

Everything starts with that removed stamina bar, because everything else flows from it. Stripping out stamina turns Mortal Shell II from a measured, defensive soulslike into an aggressive, adrenaline-forward one. You are encouraged to keep moving and keep attacking rather than poking and retreating, and the combat gains a rhythm that feels closer to a character action game than a typical Souls crawl. The hardened stance from the original survives as your defensive anchor, so there is still a read-and-react discipline underneath the speed, but the ceiling on aggression is dramatically higher.

The Shells are the other half of the design, and this is where the sequel finds its depth. You collect a set of discoverable, class-based bodies, eight of them, and you swap between them freely to change your entire approach. One turns you into a heavy tank that soaks and trades. Another leans stealthy and precise. Others sit between, and the fun is in mixing disciplines, borrowing a strength here and a survivability trait there, until you have a hybrid that fits the fight in front of you. It gives the game a build-craft dimension the first one only gestured at, and it rewards experimentation instead of punishing it.

Exploration is the quiet triumph. The world is built to be wandered, with interconnected maps that fold back on themselves and reward curiosity with shortcuts, secrets, and the satisfying click of a level design that clearly had a plan. Several reviewers singled this out as among the best navigation in the genre, and in play it is easy to see why: the game trusts you to get lost and find your own way back, and the world holds up to that trust. Progression is focused rather than bloated, which keeps the forward pull strong.

The bosses are built to test understanding rather than memorization. Instead of asking you to rote-learn one attack pattern and dodge it thirty times, the better encounters probe whether you actually grasp the systems, whether you can read a Shell matchup, exploit an opening, and adapt when the fight shifts. When it works, it is exactly the kind of combat puzzle the genre is supposed to deliver.

What holds it back is the cost of that ambition. Reaching in so many directions at once means some of them collide. There are camera problems in tight spaces, the occasional hit-detection or animation hiccup, and balance that can wobble between Shells and weapons, with a few reviewers noting less variety in gear than the biggest genre heavyweights. A minority of critics found the whole thing overreaching, its mechanics not always cohering into a single clean idea. Those are fair notes. They are also the kind of rough edges you get from a studio choosing to grow rather than play it safe, and they never sink the core, which stays consistently gripping.

Mortal Shell II keeps the grim, oppressive aesthetic that gave the original its identity, a dark fantasy of decayed flesh, cold stone, and grotesque beauty, but it deploys it across a much larger canvas. The bump in scale suits the tone. Where the first game felt like a claustrophobic vertical slice, the sequel gives its ruined world room to breathe, and the interconnected areas each carry their own dread and character rather than blurring into one gray corridor.

The art direction does a lot of the storytelling. Mortal Shell has always been coy with plot, and this sequel keeps that reticence, trusting environment and atmosphere to convey mood and history instead of spelling it out. It is a world you read through what you see: the architecture, the corpses, the strange organic horror stitched into the landscape. For players who like their soulslikes evocative and ambiguous, it hits the mark.

Technically it is more ambitious and therefore a little less airtight than the tighter original. The same rough edges that touch the combat, the camera in cramped rooms, the odd animation, surface here too, and the sheer amount of world means the polish is spread thinner than in the compact first game. But the mood never breaks. The presentation carries a confidence the studio has clearly earned, and when the light catches one of its grander vistas, Mortal Shell II looks like a game punching well above the weight class its budget suggests.