Games worth discovering

Soul Knight Arena is a tiny battle royale that’s the perfect size for mobile

4K View2023-12-16

Soul Knight Arena

Battle RoyaleMultiplayerPixelArcadeShooter

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SHOULD I PLAY SOUL KNIGHT ARENA?

Yeah, this is definitely worth checking out. Soul Knight Arena is a quick and breezy little top-down battle royale that’s all about racing to find the goofiest weapons and being the last team standing. It has a fun and colorful pixel art style, an upbeat soundtrack, tons of wacky weapons and powers to find, and a brief match length that keeps anything from sticking around long enough to get boring.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about a dozen matches of Soul Knight Arena so far, and I’d guess that puts me at around an hour and a half of game time at this point. The first few bot matches I played were very short, and generally speaking, trios games wrapped up faster than solos or duos did. At their longest, matches never went beyond seven or eight minutes. I’ve also leveled up a couple characters, including one I unlocked on the battle pass, the Taoist.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT SOUL KNIGHT ARENA?

• Easy to pick up and play. Soul Knight Arena has a few unique rules to learn, but I found them pretty easy to work out on the go. Jumping in and starting to play was a cinch—it’s standard battle royale rules with twenty players dropped onto an island. Once I was on the ground, I found that the game felt very familiar—similar to a bunch of the action RPGs and roguelites I’ve played on my phone over the past several years.

• Ludicrous guns. I’ve picked up flamethrowers, a Barrett sniper rifle, Prince’s electric guitar, various lasers, a gun that fired bees, and a large fish so far in Soul Knight Arena, and I get the feeling there are plenty more weapons still to find—I haven’t even mentioned the melee weapons, like the warhammer that made tornadoes.

• Quick match length. This is crucial for mobile games. I love a mobile game that lets me dip in for a quick round when I have a few minutes to spare—if I’m going to be playing for twenty minutes or half an hour, I might as well sit down at my PC. And so, I appreciated the fact that Soul Knight Arena matches only lasted five or six minutes each on average.

• It seems uninterested in taking my money so far. There’s nothing to buy in Soul Knight Arena yet, so I’ve just been collecting battle pass rewards and daily login bonuses, which have been plenty for me to buy levels for my preferred character classes.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN SOUL KNIGHT ARENA?

• Inventory bar can be unresponsive. There’s nothing worse than trying to quaff a healing potion in the midst of a firefight, and then looking down a couple seconds later to realize the game didn’t register your thumb tap on the quick bar. That happened to me constantly while I played, leading to a couple of frustrating early defeats.

• Map exploits. I ran into a couple spots where players could abuse terrain features in the map, remaining protected from all damage while they were still able to hit other players (specifically me). Normally this wasn’t a huge deal, since the circle will likely be closing over any given place before too long, but it was still aggravating when it did!