DOLMEN

Dolmen provides fans of SciFi and Souls games with another daunting adventure full of defeat and satisfaction. The game isn’t without faults, having a few bugs as well as some inconsistencies with some combat mechanics, but the team at Massive Work Studio have laid a solid foundation. The game provides just enough reward to make the challenge worth it.

Dolmen is a good game and has fun without any doubt, but it does not raise passions like the «souls-like» that it is.

Despite all the sympathy that we can feel for Dolmen, the perfectible experience leaves us with a cost of incompleteness.

Unfortunately, despite the ranged combat perking the experience up, Dolmen‘s general design feels like it is too indebted to soulslikes and ultimately suffers for it. The melee is not consistent, enemy AI is weak, the exploration is not deep, and the level design is just passable. What Dolmen does well is sci-fi flavored third-person shooting with a good level of challenge that isn’t a cakewalk. I hope the developers get the chance to take a look at what worked in Dolmen and try again… as it stands, it’s too tempting to make comparisons to games like Dark Souls, and those comparisons aren’t favorable.

Dolmen just feels like scraps when a four course meal is literally right there. It was a bad time to release a game of this type when it falls so short of the mark set by the best in the genre and even falls below the current imitators. I am all for expanding on a game idea, but there has to be something there to make it feel special and unique and Dolmen just doesn’t have anything setting it apart on any level.

Sadly, whilst Dolmen is a game that may have been well suited 10 or 15 years ago, with a ton of souls-likes already out there such as The Surge, Hellpoint, Mortal Shell, Nioh, and so on, there is a lot to achieve if you want to make it as a memorable experience in the action RPG genre, and Dolmen doesn’t stand up there with the cream of the crop already available.

For those that truly enjoy Souls games, even budget titles, Dolmen should give you a good twenty or so hours of content to get through, but at its current high price I can only suggest waiting for a massive sale for the rest of everyone else curious. While I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as say Hellpoint, I have to commend their bravery releasing this so shortly after Elden Ring. There’s some good ideas here, and with some more polish and refining I probably would have enjoyed my time with Dolmen much more than I did, but as it stands now I simply wanted it to end.

Dolmen doesn’t do itself any favours. It lacks soul and stimulating combat, and there’s a whopping great cavity where they should be.

Extremely derivative on a playful level and technically insufficient even by the standards of the last generation (and beyond), Dolmen is an experiment that was only minimally successful. While we liked the Lovecraftian atmosphere and the constant sense of danger that permeates the entire production, everything else should be rethought at the root. The inclusion of firearms could really add something new to the genre, but nefarious management of the energy bar ended up compromising the effectiveness of gun-play as well. Although the title is offered at the modest sum of € 39.99, at present there is no valid reason why RPG enthusiasts should prefer it to the much more inspired and deserving soulslike ones that have invaded the market in recent weeks.