Mortal Shell 2 Review

As a fan of Mortal Shell’s scaled-down approach to the soulslike back in 2020, I was very skeptical of Mortal Shell 2’s enthusiasm for making everything about it way larger, because bigger is not always better. If you felt the same, then allow me to assuage those fears from the top here: besides being bigger, Mortal Shell 2 is also better in almost every way. It still has its rough edges, mostly weird technical things and some balance issues, especially towards the end of this 25-30 hour quest. But its world, the occasionally daunting act of exploring it, and the gritty skirmishes you’ll have while doing so are all greatly improved.

As you did in the first game, you play as a creature whose shiny, sinewy body places it somewhere between a Ridley Scott monster and a corpse, one that can “embody” the forms of dead warriors of some renown and use their abilities to its ultimate ends. Like Illusion of Gaia, but with more thieves and war criminals. When you occupy one of these shells, you take on its identity and abilities. When its taken too much of a beating, you are jettisoned out, back into your original wormy form and given a chance to fight back into it. This was the Mortal Shell gimmick back then, and it's still a fun take on the last stand now.

But the amount of possible people to climb in and pilot like a squishier Iron Man has doubled in the sequel, with only a couple of returning faces joining a mostly new roster of colorful scallywags. Standouts include a ferocious cannibal, an armor clad alien, and a time-stopping cultist, all of which sound strange out of context but fit perfectly in the macabre world Mortal Shell 2 creates. The overall story is still a bit of a cryptic mess, but the side stories of these individual characters, learned by increasing your bond with them through the help of a special collectable and a very large woman, really ground it in some human (or otherwise) interactions that are relatable.

The most important improvements to these shells from the previous game isn’t how they look or what nonsense they got up to before they died, but what makes them different outside of that stuff. Previously, the nimble Tiel or the mighty Eredrim were primarily differentiated by how big their life bars were, with all the more nuanced variations tucked away in passive abilities you could spend points to unlock. These passive abilities return in much more abundance and in a better organized progression chart, but each shell now also has distinct active abilities that make them even more impactful in combat and diverse among each other. Now Tiel can disappear for short periods of time, allowing him to stealth past enemies and reemerge with a big backstabbing attack, while Eredrim can wear a single target’s stagger bars down with a big shoulder charge or handle groups with a wide blast. Landing some of these can be finicky, specifically ones that require traveling some distance or auto-locking onto enemies, and I would just inexplicably miss with abilities like Tiel’s Shadow Stab every once in a while.

Regardless, this is a gratifying step up from the original, and made actively switching between shells to try new combat tricks a rewarding experience, made all the easier since any points spent to enhance specific shells can be refunded and reallocated for free as many times as you want. I occasionally felt encouraged to do so in barely subtle ways. Have a tough enemy that leans heavily on its fire-based attacks and burn status? Max out Lazlo’s fireproof armor. This can have a hand in making later game bosses feel underpowered, as they don’t scale in the same way you can if you dedicate to the grind, invalidating their strengths while also overpowering them otherwise.

The arsenal of weapons has ballooned in kind in Mortal Shell 2, with eight main melee weapons and eight ranged sidearms to mix and match, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some are quick and great for stacking debuffs but don’t do much damage and can’t reliably interrupt enemies. Some have great range but take three-to-five business days to swing. I tended to lean towards weapons with really good running attacks, as I often started encounters with all-in alpha strikes in hopes to put enemies down as quickly as possible to avoid the very real danger most of them present. That was a little frustrating considering that, though largely mechanically sound, any actions involving clicking the sticks like running and auto-targeting were very finicky.

Each weapon has their own strings of light and heavy attacks which can be weaved together to create combos. Finding the right place to swap a light attack for its heavy counterpart in a three-hit combo in order to maximize damage while minimizing the relatively long windups of those attacks is the sort of surprisingly advanced experimentation you can find in what is generally a pretty simple system. Stamina is completely gone in Mortal Shell 2, so you’re free to swing to your heart’s content. Replacing it is Resolve, a meter filled by landing melee attacks and spent to do basically everything else, from shooting ranged weapons to shell abilities. I liked that it meant I had to stay aggressive in melee in order to reap the benefits of all the other cool stuff, and Resolve gain is steady enough without any modifications that I never felt like I was locked out of those options when I needed them.

Mortal Shell 2 varies its defensive offerings in an interesting way, treating a small number of different Seals as shields with differing functionality. One of them allows you to Harden, which turns your body to stone for a brief period in order to repel the next attack, and was the signature feature that helped Mortal Shell stand out among its soulslike peers five years ago. Another introduces a pretty genre-standard block, complete with parry if you have the right timing. A third is a parry-only option, allowing you to execute enemies much faster at the risk of getting punished yourself. I stuck with hardening most of my run - I couldn't give up the satisfaction of being able to harden midswing to eat incoming attacks and finishing my offense on the other side safely - but I did appreciate how this operated as a sort of de facto difficulty setting, with an option to switch it at will should you want to try your luck.

The melee options are consistent and reliable, but largely mundane in comparison to the sidearms. The big bad ballistzooka from the first game returns in all its glory, but is basic in comparison to some of the new options, like the haunted skeleton of a baby in a cage that radiates evil or a magical lute that can confuse foes. I found that these had more specific uses than melee weapons - the crossbow was for picking off weak enemies on the fringes or stacking debuffs on an enemy while the aforementioned options were for starting fights with a bang.

Details

Like shells, both ranged and melee weapons can be enhanced, and those enhancements can be refunded to reapply on a different set of weapons. This refund isn't completely free, though. You’ll get the materials used to upgrade that weapon back, but the gold that was spent is lost. This does mean you need to be willing to commit more to the weapons you invest in unless you’re willing to grind a lot of gold. It also sort of discouraged me from too much experimentation late-game, even as I was still finding new weapons, knowing that it would be an expensive waste of time if I didn’t love one.

On top of all that, Tarstones that add additional stats and features to your gameplan can be slotted into your weapons and shells. They come in all sorts, as simple as raising damage or crit rate passively, or adding the ability to infuse elemental properties to your attacks for limited periods of time. But some even go as far as adding new abilities to your arsenal, like a big sword spin or a bullet rain for area damage. Tarstones are fickle, though; many of them can only be attached to certain weapons, making the war tool you invest in even more important. I found some of the most useful ones pretty early, and being cool and flashy aside, I went most of the game opting to spend my Resolve elsewhere.

It's the combination of weapons and shells that really creates the playstyles, and those configurations felt endless. While I'm sure there is some min-maxing to be done between melee, ranged, and shell combos, I found that I could make anything work in some capacity, which actually had the unexpected effect of staying more within the lines when it came to gearing up. Each shell has a signature weapon, and though nothing about them changes in their hands, some of these pairings do feel uniquely matched. The minigun is slow to startup and leaves you stationary while you rain bullets downrange, but Proxima’s ability to mitigate incoming damage passively makes her the perfect person to fire it. Gragu’s axe whirls with sometimes wild abandon to do good damage but not much stun, leaving you open for attacks pretty regularly, but Gruga’s ability to refill his healing item by killing enemies adds some reward to the risks.

These shells, weapons, and Tarstones are scattered through a dense and dangerous reimagining of Fallgrim. In the first game, a central hub zone sprawled into three directions, each path narrowing into a dungeon with a boss waiting eagerly at the end. Mortal Shell 2 takes that concept to its limit, with the “central hub” zone being a huge pangea of twisted flora, bizarrely bleached mountains, and dilapidated kingdoms. You have to fight your way to the six gates lingering at the fringes of the land, each the threshold of their own dungeons with evil to cleanse on the other side.

There are a dizzying amount of paths to get sidetracked down on your journey. Around every corner felt like another pair of corners to turn. Fallgrim is perfectly designed to engross you. Each angle reveals just enough of a thing on a horizon or a path fading into a dark cave that you just have to know what’s going on over there. There's a map this time around to help keep your bearings, but I do still wish it had a more robust pinning system or a note option, because you are so often forced to leave a point of interest behind to explore something else… and then something else, and then something else, and before you know it you forgot about that first thing you meant to come back to. It also doesn’t help solve how confusing the world can be to navigate at first. Things start to look very samey until you get some significant travel time logged. It's better at landmarking locations with unique features than the first game was, at least.

Of the many things you can expect to find out in the wild, like altars that produce mini combat gauntlets for a prize or gates that sling you across the map towards faraway lands, it's the many little dungeons littering the world that were always the most curious. Each one of the misty doorways reveals a self-contained mini-adventure. Sometimes these are just snaking tunnels or rundown mines with puzzles to solve or doors to unlock that hold some sort of valuable treasures in their depths. Sometimes its just an arena where you need to outlast the enemies for your prize. These bite-sized encounters are also in beacons, jagged spikes that jut through the soil like rotting teeth that serve as your bonfire-style checkpoints. What you do in them isn't necessarily different, but when you walk down one’s narrow corridors and out the door to reveal a cloudy night sky above, the strange nature of this world is most apparent in them. They weren’t Breath of the Wild levels of clever, but they really broke up the main adventure well.

I got pretty used to seeing these beacons because the monsters lurking around Fallgrim can be real nightmares. Almost any group of enemies can be lethal if you’re not on your game. I can tell you how many times I didn’t take a lowly group of miners seriously, missed an attack, and got jumped nearly to death as punishment. Foes come in many different forms, from surly, iron-clad knights and crazed cultists, to noodle-armed slendermen, to exploding bats - everything is more cursed than you first expect it to be. The spiders have human faces. There are dog sized creatures whose bodies are just bearded skulls. These are the weirdest bad guys I’ve seen in quite some time. It's also refreshing to see a game so clearly inspired by Dark Souls - and a developer who historically was the best at capturing and evolving the sort of dark wonder of FromSoftware’s signature series - so gleefully go above and beyond in creep factor. Bosses are the culmination of this inspired aesthetic, mothman knight and a crazed bog witch in a fiery chariot of a wheelchair among my favorite, even if they aren’t always the most interesting combat scenarios in game.