Have you ever wanted an anime to become an MMORPG? SoulWorker from developer Lion Games let’s your wish become a reality. Those who love anime themed games and equally love action oriented MMORPGs will feel right at home while playing SoulWorker. There are 4 main characters to choose from each with their own unique style and set of weapons to use. Go online and join others in a fun and exciting MMORPG in the form of SoulWorker.

SoulWorker is a traditional MMORPG with an anime inspired theme. Players choose from 1 of 4 characters with the ability to customize them with fashion accessories obtained while playing. Embark on numerous quests alone or with up to 3 other players to defeat various enemies and defeat bosses. Players can also access—once they reach a certain point of the game—a PVP area where you can battle against other players to see who the better SoulWorker is. With tons of quests, an exciting story and a slew of enemies to face, SoulWorker might appeal to you if you’re into the MMORPG scene. Did we also mention it’s free to play?

The world has begun to head to possible destruction thanks to a large wormhole dubbed The Void appearing in the sky. The Void has begun to let loose monsters and other demonic forces creating chaos with destruction and death. However, the world might be able to fight back thanks to a powerful ally in the form of SoulWorkers. These warriors have the ability to use powerful armaments to stop the monsters and can possibly end the void. You are about to become one of these SoulWorkers and it will be up to you to save humanity from extinction.

We here at Honey’s Anime HQ are no strangers to the world of MMORPGs. In fact, many of us have easily spent years harnessing our skills by playing numerous free to play and subscription based MMOs so we consider ourselves pretty well versed in the genre. Recently, developer Lion Games released a free to play MMORPG called SoulWorker and we couldn’t help but want to test it out ourselves, especially when we saw it was anime themed. What were our thoughts after putting several hours into this MMO? Find out in our review of SoulWorker!

SoulWorker is a pretty interesting MMO, that much we discovered quickly when beginning our adventure for the first time. Players choose one of 4 heroes—Erwin Arclight, Haru Estia, Lilly Bloommerchen and Stella Unibell—each with a unique gameplay style and design. For example, Erwin—who was our main choice for this review—is a gun tooting playboy while Stella uses a guitar to hit her enemies with noise and sound. Each character can be customized slightly but unlike most MMOs, SoulWorker tries to inspire an anime inspired story with each character having their own story and personality. We also noticed 2 silhouetted character slots meaning SoulWorker might get 2 new characters in future updates. Regardless though, once you choose your character you’ll enter the dilapidated future and begin your quest as a SoulWorker.

By definition, if you’ve played any—and we mean any—MMORPG in the past, you’ll know what to expect in SoulWorker. Players will go through a brief tutorial and then be sent to a hub area where they can interact with other players, buy items from various vendors and of course, take quests. Be prepared to be slightly confused by the slew of text you’ll have to read and various in-game systems within SoulWorker as there is a ton. However, after the first few hours of playing, you’ll begin to understand the basics and before you know it, you’ll almost completely understand SoulWorker.

Now for any MMO to be fun, the combat and questing needs to be the highlight of the game. SoulWorker works with the combat element but falls a bit short with the questing. Combat in SoulWorker revolves around players using their weapons and creating combos with their left and right mouse buttons—or specified buttons on a gamepad if you have one—and using the keyboard to use skills. What SoulWorker does differently than some MMORPGs is it allows players to create flashy combos with skills they obtain as they level up. You can chain moves together and create large chains combos almost similar to an action game like Devil May Cry. Add to this the ability to dodge and do jump attacks and you’ll almost think SoulWorker is an action game and not a MMORPG.

Quests, however, are where you realize that indeed, SoulWorker is a MMO. The quests in SoulWorker range from kill this number of enemies to hunt down a specific target. They aren’t that amazing and usually, they will require you to go through a specific area multiple times. Unfortunately, you’ll be returning to a lot of the same areas multiple times as specific areas are locked behind player levels. That’s right folks, be prepared to level grind. If you care about getting fashion pieces, completing sub quests and defeating enemies on different difficulties—of which there are three—then you’ll be fine about the repetition in SoulWorker. However, if you like MMOs to not force you to beat the same enemies over and over—realistically though most make you do this—then SoulWorker won’t impress you much in this regard.

Luckily, there are several ways to enjoy SoulWorker to avoid the pain of repetition sinking in. Players can work with others via auto searches for areas or even engage in PVP battles. The PVP is simple enough as it feels like the base game, but it still gives you a bit of freedom to do something other than PVE. We also did like the bosses in SoulWorker—even if they are reused a lot per area—which kept us on our toes and were quite tough. If you do die during combat you can always abandon the area and keep your experience gained or use a soulstone to resurrect and deal some damage to the foes around you upon revival. Be careful with soulstones though, you might get a lot of them early on but later when you need them, they will be less plentiful. We learned that the hard way here at Honey’s Anime HQ and that’s why we give you this pro tip, just abandon an area and grind a bit or search for players to help you out on a tough mission.

SoulWorker, in terms of graphics and music, is pretty sweet. We love the anime inspired visuals and even the cutscenes feel like a CGI anime at times. The music also fits the mood with epic scores during regular skirmishes and boss battles alike. We do wish there were more cutscenes though, but they are enough spread out to at least give you a new one here and there. SoulWorker’s biggest weakness though is in the enemy variety which we found to be a bit lackluster early on. The same can be said of the environments which really just feel like different colored cityscapes more often than not. Regardless though, for a free to play MMORPG SoulWorker looks solid and we can tell Lion Games put their heart into this game visually and musically.

SoulWorker really is a pretty cool and enjoyable MMORPG held back only by some faults here and there. The anime inspired story and world kept us here at Honey’s Anime HQ hooked to every cutscene and piece of narrative banter from the characters we met. Equally, the flashy combat is fluid and fun even after several hours of gameplay. However, the repetitive nature and the ho hum environments as well as copy and pasted enemies makes fighting in SoulWorker sometimes feel like a chore. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a new MMORPG to sink your teeth into we can see you enjoying SoulWorker. We here at Honey’s Anime recommend checking out SoulWorker seeing as how it doesn’t cost a cent to play and might be your next MMORPG fix for quite some time.

We really enjoyed our time with SoulWorker and already anticipate us playing it during our free time for quite some time. SoulWorker has some repetitive issues and we kind of wish there were more enemy varieties, but we anticipate that as time goes on developer Lion Games will add even more content as most MMORPGs do that if they grow more popular. We do hope SoulWorker becomes popular too as we think it’s a solid free to play MMORPG. Have you tried out SoulWorker yet or do you plan to? Tell us using the comments below and for all your gaming review needs be sure to keep stuck to our hive here at Honey’s Anime.