DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME. Ever since the beggining of 2024, Soulworker has been under a new management. That is Valfoe. While the game has recieved content updates, within a span of a one year it has become incredibly pay 2 win, the devs ruined trading, which in result destroyed the ingame economy.
In one year Valfoe managed to gang-bang, burn, butcher, demolish and vaporize anything and everything that made this game fun. It is the process of No Man's Sky, but in reverse.
Majority of players are just AFK, new content just lazily recycles the old one. Even with their desperate expansion to China, the player numbers only rose by 600 (effectively doubling the player numbers at the time).
And Valfoe killed it.
They just don't want to admit it and are fightinig tooth and nail to keep it on life support just so that they can squeeze just a little bit more money out of you.

They killed my favourite game. It wasn't the best game out there, but I liked it...
And there will probably never be anything like it ever again...


Original review:
I've been playing this game for over 6 years now... including the old version and I would say it's one of those underrated MMOs. Many people will complain that there is no character creation like in other games, however, I see that as a sort of refreshment. While on one hand it's nice to have character customization to the point where you can create an absolute crime against nature, like in the souls games, it's refreshing to have a character with limited customization that gives the guy you play as just a bit more personality. You don't necessarily create your own character, you follow a story of a character you decide to play as.

Besides character creation the game is a simple dungeon based MMO. Just go in, kill everything, come out. It can be a little repetitive, especially before you get to the endgame but it doesn't make the game unplayable.

I have to admit that my opinion is very biased. I do enjoy this game but I can list out a few things I have a problem with.
First of all while the game has somewhat interesting lore, it's hidden behin thousands and thousands of lines of dialog and NPC quest, which doesn't nacessarily bother me, but many people do have problem with this and it is a valid criticism. Not everyone has the time to become a wannabe VaatiVidya and dig though the lore.
Second is the criticism towards the playable character Lee Nabi and Dhana Opini, both of which start at lvl 45 due to lore related reasons but the game doesn't limit you from playing them immediately after you download the game for the first time. I have to emphasize this point because it is important to realize that if you choose any other character, it takes you somewhere between 5 and 15 hours before you get from lvl 1 to lvl 45 (the time differs based on if you only do the main story quest or also do all the side quest and 100% progression). These hours are specifically designed so that the new players can get acustomed to the game and properly learn and understand the most basic mechanics. However, if you pick any of the above mentioned characters, you skip this enite section of the game and get trown into what can be described as the old endgame, that was in it's prime about 7 years back. Personaly I've ecountered many Nabi playes who just picked up the game and had no idea what they are supposed to do while being in one of the early end-game locations, just because they though "big booba sniper goes brrrr." I've stopped counting after running into 60 players that were like this. A simple solution for this problem would be for the devs to lock both characters and only unlocking them after you reach lvl 45 with a different character.

And since I'm on the topic of characters there is a vide variety of them. 10 to be exact. Each with their own personality, playstyle and their positives and negatives. Unfortunately this game has seen a large ammount of controversy and one of the biggest being in reation to the character due to the fact that out of the 10 characters, only two of them are male, the second one being added as the 5th playable character, back around 2016. While it makes a certain inbalance, it's not as severe since the writing on MOST of the female characters is good enough to counteract this negative. The reason behind this controversy was more buisness sided, rather than game sided, since speculations are that the devs saw the success of a new female character with the release of Chii Aruel, the 7th released character, and decided to milk this strategy for all it's worth.

Last but not least, many people say that this game is heavily pay to win, and while it is true that it requires a lot of grinding in the endgame to have a proper gear, it is decently possible to be comepletely free to play and get into the endgame. Many requirements for the endgame can be surpassed just by participating in events that from time to time give you the necessary tools to set up your character, mainly special equipment on outfits known as brooches, and also by looking up the official "birthday" of the character that you play and logging in on that specific day to get a free outfit that allows you to equip all the necessary brooches you need. And even if you are not that lucky, the cheapest costumes in the cash shop (the one that requires real money) can be found for prices between 10 and 15$ which is a decent price. Especially if you count in the fact that SoulWorker is free to play, you have a possible alternative to get by without paying and that the moment when you're required to play is after around 50 hours of playtime (even more if you decide to try and play multiple characters, for which you don't even need to pay to unlock a new character slot).

Overall even though it is not the best game in terms of polish, even though the game had its fair share of controversies, it is a game worth playing so if you are thinking about playing it, just give it a try. If you like it and decide to stick around, we'll be happy to help you, the community is supportive and the community discord is very helpful (discord.gg/soulworker btw)