Co-op Days: Solasta
This Dungeons & Dragons inspired game helped me have some of the most fun weekends in the last 6 months
Played on: PC
Play time: 64 hours
Happy New Year, everyone! After a super chaotic December, I’m back with a lot of energy and a new series for my newsletter!
Co-op days will be a series of newsletters where I write about the multiplayer and/or co-op games I’ve played with my friends and let you know my unfiltered thoughts. As always, I’ll be honest with the plus sides and negative sides. Today, we are looking at Solasta: Crown of the Magister’s main campaign.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a Dungeons & Dragons inspired game where you can create your own character and go into adventures either by yourself or with your friends. If you are familiar with DnD, you’ll have no issues understanding the game mechanics but if you are like me and have no idea how to play, you might need some guidance. Thankfully, one of the people I played with is a Dungeon Master and knows everything about DnD by heart, so I kinda used him as a wiki.
I won’t get into too much about how to play or how it works, as that information is readily available on many other platforms. I’d like to talk about my personal experience, how we played it and the impressions it left on us.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take any screenshots from our playthrough except for my own character, so I had to scour the internet for screenshots for the gameplay. They should give you an idea on how the game plays out more or less!
Setup
I’ve played through this game over the span of 6 months with a 4-people team: Me, my brother and our two childhood friends. We all grew up playing all sorts of games together and these people might as well be the biggest reason why I’m so interested in games now. One of them is, as I’ve mentioned, a DnD Dungeon Master and is the reason we started playing Solasta in the first place.
We had a Fighter who worked mostly as a Ranger, a Mage, a Paladin and a Cleric. I am almost always the healer in any game we play, so it was no surprise that I chose to be the Cleric. It is always the role that I feel the most comfortable in. I always choose the healer or the archer role, and since we already had an archer, I was pretty happy with choosing the Cleric.
We played this game for so long because of scheduling conflicts and timezone differences, I don’t even remember what the beginning of the game was like.
Story
I’ll be quite honest with you guys, I barely paid any attention to the story, which is something I almost never do. I always try to pay attention, because I know a lot of work goes into creating a story for a video game and I want to respect it. The issue for me is that the story felt predictable and the NPCs weren’t that interesting. We were goofing off during those sections too, which made it harder to focus on the dialogue but I was having a lot of fun, which is what video games are for, I guess.
Where the game lacks in its narrative, it makes up for it in its mechanics. That’s where we had the most fun, and where the game really showcased its strong suit.
Mechanics
The game features a turn based battle mechanic where everyone on the field rolls an initiative and plays in order according to what they rolled. As I was not familiar with what “rolling an initiative” meant, I was confused with the mechanics of it at first. I’m still not a 100% sure of how it works, but it’s not as simple as just rolling a dice.
Each character (and enemy) has an initial dexterity stat, which is what apparently influences the final result of the initiative. As a fan of RPGs - JRPGs in particular - I’m not unfamiliar with such terms. Dexterity, wisdom, strength… Such stats are common in the RPG world of video games, but I had never used them this extensively, to the point where it affected every single choice I made. I think it was only in Disco Elysium that I actually paid attention to such things because it mattered.
Speaking of Disco Elysium, I should really talk about that game sometime soon. It is such a unique game that deserves to be talked about more. Anyway…
The combat is where all the fun lies at for this game. And when you have a group of people with such different approaches to combat, it becomes even livelier.
My brother, as the Paladin (in other terms, the Tank), wanted to jump headlong into battles, and when he got the hang of how combat worked, he never really tried being stealthy and ran ahead, leaving us to catch up to him.
This was contrasted directly by our Fighter/Ranger/DM, who wanted to calculate every single action and get into the perfect position before starting a battle.
Our Mage had an even more chaotic style, where he would want to get into the perfect position before the battle but it was just to throw out his Fireball spell, and sometimes he would just go “You might feel a bit warm” and blast everything around us - sometimes he even did damage to our Paladin! Multiple times!
Me? Well, I was the Cleric, therefore the Healer, which meant that I had to be the mediator and stop people from dying. There were times where I felt like I was the mother hen to a hectic dysfunctional family. But that didn’t mean that I was just standing in the back, providing support. In fact, I was somehow one of the main damage dealers in the first quarter of the game, until we started getting better gear for our main damage dealers.
Turns out that the Cleric class in this game is pretty busted in terms of offensive spells. In fact, I was kind of unsatisfied with the healing I was able to provide to my teammates and I thought that the healing spells left a lot to be desired. Maybe it’s in the nature of DnD though, I don’t know.
Hoarding items
The game falls victim to one of the most classic traps in gaming: hoarding items. Have you ever finished a game and realized that your whole inventory is cluttered by items and potions that you wanted to use “when the time is right”?
We had the exact same situation where we would almost always manage to scrape by without having to even open our inventory. So we never used the items until the final battle. Because of this, I had no idea how to use them in-battle. I was always crafting healing elixirs whenever I had time outside of fights. By the end, I had several amazing elixirs just laying there in my inventory. I was ready to use them during big fights! Then they never came…
There was one time I intended to use an elixir for a teammate, but before I was even able to use it on him, an enemy knocked me out too… So they remained untouched in my pocket, collecting dust.
Final Battle
Warning: Some spoilers but nothing too serious
I have to say, the final battle of the campaign is one of the least satisfactory battles I’ve ever encountered in gaming, let alone just this game.
They tried making it big. There was a long rest point right before you start going through some pretty cool little battles where you have to defeat some of the enemies you encountered before. A cool idea, preparing you for a big boss battle at the end, right? Except that there is no other long rest place before the big battle and the spell users have already used some of their spell slots, thinking that they would be able to recover them.
Then you reach the destination and some dragons come to your rescue. You’d think these powerful entities would help you bury the enemies to the ground.
For us, they ended up being liabilities. They kept the enemies at a distance, which meant our Paladin couldn’t reach them in time and wasted several turns.
They were right in the middle of the monsters, which means neither the Mage nor I as the Cleric were able to use our AOE spells because doing so would hurt the dragons.
Only the Ranger was able to do some decent damage before the dragons died anyway. I even wasted a healing spell on one of the dragons, only for it to die right after. But by then, the enemies had done decent damage to us and all I could do was try to keep everyone up and couldn’t even provide support spells, let alone attack.
Our DM friend realized then that this is probably the last battle, so we should use up our items. A little too late, but better late than never I guess.
Then the battle morphs into a survival round where you have to fend off waves of enemies with seemingly no end to them. Well… this is not good game design, guys. The last battle of the game, and there is no victory to be obtained. You just have to endure waves of enemies until a cutscene comes up.
The initial positioning of the characters for this survival round was pre-determined too, which was a real shame. We always positioned ourselves so that the Paladin was right at front of us. Instead, he was all the way to the side and wasted time trying to get to the front, and the enemies had already reached us by then. Not a big deal, but it felt like the “choice” was taken away from us, which is a minus for a game that’s supposed to be determined by choices.
Due to the nature of the last battle, there was no feeling of triumph for me at the end. We were all just like “That’s it?”. No big boss to defeat and no strategy at all? Just surviving is easy when you get to a certain level, and I wanted to use my big spells as a last hurrah but the game never gave me the chance. I had already used up most of my spell slots anyway even before reaching the last battle.
I won’t even get into the general technical issues with the game where if a player loses connection, they cannot rejoin the game. The host needs to set the game up again. And connection losses happened often because I live in a kind of rural area, and one of us lives on the other side of the world. There needs to be better solutions to issues like this than setting up everything from scratch again.
Verdict
Despite the frustrations I mentioned above, this game was super fun. I won’t deny that my friend group was a big factor in this, but the game mechanics gave way to some really fun dynamics between us too.
If you’re looking for a long-running game to play with friends, I absolutely recommend it. I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, but I hear that it has a lot of similarities with that game. So if you liked Baldur’s Gate 3, chances are you’ll like this one too.
Nice review! I've never heard of Solasta, but it seems to fit right up there with games like Divinity and Pillars of Eternity.