Dolmen is a 3rd person action RPG, which can be described as something you’d get if Dark Souls and Dead Space had a child together. From the indie developers of Massive Work Studio, Dolmen takes bits and pieces of the mentioned games, and combines them. The finished project is an interesting mix, but is troubled by clunky combat and an outdated UI.
Game Name: Dolmen
Platform(s): PC (reviewed), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Publisher(s): Prime Matter
Developer(s): Massive Work Studio
Release Date: May 20, 2022
While the name of the game, Dolmen is also the name of a crystal. It’s a high commodity item for its unique properties. After an interdimensional rift formed within the mining station called Revion Prime, infesting it with all sorts of nasty creatures and who knows what. This is where your ticket is punched, and you’re tasked with heading down to the station, killing the creatures causing the problems, and bringing back any Dolmen crystals you find so the eggheads and figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.
Story-wise, there’s nothing major going on here, and to be honest, if you’re playing Dolmen for the story, you may want to rethink that. However, should the story be important, you’ll be treated to in-game cinematics and bits of information that are scattered through the game, to be found on terminals and other spots.
The combat, while borrowing heavily from the Fromsoftware entries, feels rewarding if clunky at times. Attacks are handled via light and heavy attacks and can be used in combos. Using a gun, you can whittle down your enemy’s health while applying various debuffs to give you a small advantage against them. You can use a shield that can block incoming damage, parry, or to send back incoming projectiles to the sender. While it feels cliche to keep referencing the Fromsoftware games, I’m sure this is precisely what Massive Work Studio had in mind. However, to the developer’s credit, they’ve added a twist that will keep players on their toes.
While traditional health and stamina meters are straightforward and universal, there’s also an energy meter that provides your character with several uses. Healing, attacking with guns, applying buffs to you, and applying debuffs to enemies all require energy, which comes from batteries, and striking enemies with melee weapons while wearing specific gear. Think of this as the FP resource from Dark Souls 3. The more you use it, the less you have. Except now, it also is the only way you can heal up, forcing you to decide if you really want to waste that energy and batteries. You can also gain energy back by striking enemies with melee weapons while wearing specific gear, which does add some dynamic to the energy resource system and awards aggressive players.
This became more apparent when I squared up against the first boss I encountered. I needed the energy to do some damage while also trying to heal. Running out of energy, you’ll have to pop a battery; if you can, or smack the mobs that came out to gain a small amount of energy. It’s not exactly an ideal situation to sit in place for two seconds trying to activate a battery, so you can heal up or get off a quick shot, so the energy resource system is rather annoying at times. The enemies in the game don’t exactly give you much time to do so either. Sitting still while praying that something doesn’t hit you while you desperately need a heal was a pain. I can’t say I’m a fan of the system.
Sadly, the combat isn’t as smooth as I’d hoped. Melee attacks are clunky, and jumping melee attacks are rather slow and take more stamina than I’d like them to. The best way to describe them is that they’re similar to the attacks in jumping attacks in Virtua Fighter – you have some hang time here. At times, it doesn’t seem worth it, unless you pump a ton of points into your endurance. Ranged attacks are a bit better, but at times I’ve noticed that they miss their mark, despite being locked on. During boss fights, regardless of which attack I’d used, sometimes the camera would shift, and I’d end up attacking in a direction I wasn’t even pointed at. It’s frustrating, as it takes away from an otherwise fun and interesting experience.
Of course, you can’t mention the combat without mentioning the other side of things; death. Yes, you’ll die quite a few times in Dolmen and thankfully, death doesn’t mean the end. Whenever you meet an untimely demise, you’ll quickly find yourself back at the last checkpoint you accessed. You’ll keep all the weapons and gear that you’ve crafted or found, but you’ll lose any Nanite (currency) or Dolmen fragments that you’ve collected thus far. In a similar fashion, you only get one chance to collect those. Should you say hello to death prior to that, you’ll lose them.
The enemies in the game vary from interesting to flat-out boring, so there’s some hit and miss here. When it came to the bosses, I enjoyed the challenges, and some had me stuck until I figured out the best way to take them down. I love the bosses, but hated the standard enemies.
One really cool thing that DOlmen features is the ability to respawn bosses that you’ve already defeated. Assuming you have the required Dolem crystals, you can open up a terminal in your hub or in the world, and spawn a boss. Beat it, and you’ll be able to earn items to build boss weapons and nanites. And if die during that fight you don’t lose anything other than the Dolmen crystals you used to spawn the boss. This is something I wish other games would do because this is fun. And it’s an easy way to become overpowered in a short period of time.
While you’re running around in Dolmen, you’ll acquire resources that can be used to craft gear. It’s very similar to another Soulslike game, The Surge. Every part of your digital avatar can be crafted; armor and weapons. You’re also given a few different choices along the way. Should you not know which piece of gear is better than the other or what bonuses it offers, there’s a handy explanation that breaks it down. That way, you won’t have craft’s remorse – but only if you pay attention to it. When crafting gear, you can also add bonuses to them. Instead of building standard gear, if you have the right resources, you can craft something truly impressive and better suited to keep you alive.
And while crafting things is cool, I do have an issue with the process of doing so. The UI isn’t straightforward, and when you do craft stuff you need to pay attention to the requirements, which aren’t very apparent. Sure, you may have the materials to craft this amazing piece of gear, but if you don’t look at the requirements that are only listed in red and if you don’t know what to look for, you’ll miss it. Then when you try to equip the stuff, you find out that you can’t. This is just part of the UI woes that I’ll get into later.
The UI is terrible
The UI is dated; that’s the best way to describe it. It doesn’t provide you with detailed information in sections that it needs to. Like when you craft items, there’s no ability to compare what you have versus what you’re making. Selecting an item and then going back to the main section will toss you back to the beginning of the selected portion. Trying to equip items or changing your settings is a chore as you never know what’s being selected as there’s no indicator, just a color change. If this was a few years ago then this would be acceptable, but not now. With so many games that have improved on this, the UI in Dolmen is a step backward, and that’s a shame.
Please, update this, as it really hurts the game.
PC Performance
My time with Dolmen was with the PC version, and the game didn’t skip a beat on my up to the task PC. Equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5600x, Nvidia RTX 3080, and Windows 11, the gameplay was a silky-smooth 60 frames per second with most settings on high. As Nvidia’s DLSS was an option, I opted to enable it and toggled the quality preset while also enabling the Ray-Tracing features. Still, the performance was great, even at 1440p and 4K. I did see a few stutters, but that likely was due to me recording gameplay footage and playing on the same PC.
Multiplayer, how does it work
While Dolmen does feature a multiplayer component, I wasn’t able to test it as no one was around. However, as I understand it, Dolmen has a limited online co-op system. While games like Dark Souls let players join up to take down enemies and bosses, the session ends once the host or person who joins is killed. Being keenly aware of this, Massive Work Studio has decided to take things differently. Players will be able to activate a checkpoint. There, they can look for players to help take down bosses, and once the boss is defeated, that session ends.
Once the game is released, I’ll test this more in-depth. Sorry about the lack of coverage here.
Verdict
That’s not to say that Dolmen is a bad game, because it isn’t. However, when I think about all the recent games in the genre that I’ve played over the past couple of years, just about everything in Dolmen feels dated. The UI looks and feels incomplete, the combat isn’t impactful, the levels are boring, going into new areas requires the game to load which takes 4-5 seconds, and after beating the game I have little desire to jump back into the game.
I know this feels harsh, but it needs to be said. If Dolmen was released a few years earlier, its chances would have been better, but as it stands, I’d only recommend Dolmen if you’re looking a sci-fi Soulslike experience. Here’s to hoping that Massive Work Studio updates the game and removes the sore points.
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Summary
Dolmen is an interesting Soulslike experience that is troubled by clunky combat, and an outdated UI, which hurts the game’s chances of standing out in a crowded market with games that does what it does, but better.
