Soul Hackers 2

Ringo isn't human, and Soul Hackers 2 never lets you forget it. She's an agent of Aion, an artificial intelligence built to prevent the apocalypse by recruiting "Devil Summoners" -- humans who can command demons -- into a fight against a rival faction that wants the end of the world to arrive on schedule. It's a strong hook, wrapped in a neon-soaked vision of near-future Japan that looks and sounds like nothing else Atlus currently publishes. What it can't quite do is escape the shadow of the studio's bigger, longer-running series, and its own Steam review history -- Mixed, across 3,318 ratings -- reads like a fanbase that wanted a mainline Shin Megami Tensei experience and got something leaner and more compressed instead.

Combat that earns its reputation

The best thing Soul Hackers 2 does is combat, and it's worth saying so plainly before getting into everything else. The series' signature press-turn weakness-hunting is still here, but it's been reworked into something called the Sabbath system: hit an enemy's elemental weakness and one of Ringo's demons joins a "stack." At the end of the round, every stacked demon unloads a combined attack that can wipe out an entire encounter in one satisfying burst. It streamlines combat compared to a mainline SMT title -- turns move faster, and fights rarely drag -- while keeping the weakness-exploiting puzzle that makes the series distinctive. Reviewers across the spectrum, including plenty who otherwise dislike the game, single this system out as genuinely well designed.

The trade-off is depth. Stripping out some of the series' harder tactical wrinkles in favor of pace makes individual fights less demanding, and by the midgame the Sabbath loop can start to feel like the whole toolkit rather than one part of a larger one. It's fun in the moment far more consistently than it's challenging. Demon fusion and recruitment, another series staple, is intact and functional here, though it's noticeably slimmer than the systems in mainline SMT games -- fewer demons to collect, fewer fusion permutations to chase, which fits the game's overall smaller scope but will register as a step down for anyone coming straight from a Persona or Shin Megami Tensei V save file.

Soul Matrix: a dungeon system that undersells the rest of the game

Where Soul Hackers 2 loses ground is exploration. Outside story-critical areas, most of the game's dungeon crawling happens inside each party member's "Soul Matrix" -- an abstract space representing their memories, built almost entirely from repeating corridors of blue geometric cubes. It's not first-person the way the original 1997 Soul Hackers was, but the visual variety that replaces it never really arrives: reviewers have compared these spaces unfavourably to Persona 3's Tartarus, itself a byword for recycled dungeon design, which is a rough comparison for a 2022 release to draw. Progression through the Soul Matrix ties directly into character growth -- each labyrinth floor unlocks new passive or active skills for that party member -- so the reward loop works even when the space delivering it doesn't. It just means a meaningful chunk of the game's runtime takes place somewhere the design team clearly spent less of its budget.

A cast people like, wrapped around a story that needed more room

Soul Hackers 2's characters are consistently the thing reviewers credit even when scoring the game low. Ringo, in particular, gets singled out repeatedly as a likeable, well-written lead who makes the connective tissue between dungeons worth sitting through. The plot itself -- factional conflict over whether the apocalypse should happen at all -- is solid Atlus territory, but a recurring complaint is that the main campaign moves through its beats too quickly to give the stakes room to land, especially compared to the hundred-plus-hour scope players expect from the studio's flagship series.

That complaint connects directly to the game's most talked-about controversy. "Lost Numbers," a $15.95 story arc and dungeon sold as day-one downloadable content, follows Ringo investigating a separate incident that ties back into the main plot. Multiple outlets and a real share of the Steam review corpus describe it not as optional bonus material but as content that meaningfully improves the base game's pacing and characterisation -- the kind of thing that, in a mainline SMT or Persona release, would simply be in the game. Selling that separately on a NZ$112.95 title, alongside several other cosmetic and convenience DLC packs at launch, is the single most durable complaint in this game's review history, and it's not hard to see why: it reads less like optional extra content and more like a chunk of the story held back at the point of sale.

Presentation carries its weight

Whatever criticism the dungeons and pacing draw, the art direction largely doesn't. Character designs lean into a stylised, slightly grungy cyberpunk aesthetic that's distinct from both the Persona series' polish and mainline SMT's grimness, and the soundtrack's electronic, club-inflected score fits the setting better than a generic orchestral JRPG score would have. The voice cast -- available in both English and Japanese -- holds up across a campaign most players finish in well under thirty hours, and the English dub in particular gets called out favourably often enough in the review corpus to be worth flagging for players who normally default to Japanese audio in Atlus games.

On PC specifically, a handful of players report Steam Deck compatibility problems despite the storefront listing Deck support, along with early technical hiccups tied to DLC delivery in the first week after launch -- one of the more detailed launch-week reviews describes paying for a costume pack that simply didn't apply in-game. These read as launch-window friction that Atlus patched over time rather than an ongoing issue for anyone buying now, but they're a real part of the record for a full-price release from a major publisher.

Value against the rest of the catalogue

The sticking point that ties everything above together is price. At NZ$112.95 for a campaign most players clear in under thirty hours, Soul Hackers 2 is charging mainline-SMT money for a spin-off-sized experience, and then layering paid DLC -- a $15.95 story arc, plus separate costume, item and demon packs -- on top of that on day one. None of those add-ons are strictly required to finish the story, but the recurring argument from players who bought Lost Numbers is that it resolves real pacing gaps rather than adding pure bonus content, which is a different proposition from cosmetic DLC and a harder one to defend at a series price point that already sits at the premium end of the genre.

Final verdict

Soul Hackers 2 is a genuinely fun turn-based RPG wrapped around a combat system worth playing on its own merits, held back by dungeons that don't match the studio's reputation and a day-one DLC strategy that undercuts trust in what you're actually paying full price for. It isn't a bad game -- the number of "not particularly good, but I can't bring myself to give it a negative review" reviews in its own history says as much -- but it's a noticeably smaller, more compressed experience than Atlus' other RPGs, sold at a price that assumes otherwise. Fans of the Sabbath system and Ringo as a character will get real value here, ideally once it's on sale and with the Lost Numbers arc included rather than treated as an afterthought.