Mortal Shell II Review: A Massive Improvement Over the Original

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Mortal Shell. It wasn’t a bad game by any means, but the overall flow of combat never really clicked with me. It felt clunky, often slow, and simply wasn’t satisfying enough to keep me hooked until the end. However, its unique mechanic of claiming shells to alter your stats and playstyle impressed me and left me curious to see what a sequel could do.

When the reveal trailer for Mortal Shell II was shown during the 2025 Summer Game Fest, I was baffled by how different it looked compared to the first. The combat was quicker and more brutal, and it instantly looked like the developers fixed my major complaint about the first game. That reveal trailer sold me on giving it a try, but it wasn’t until I played the Mortal Shell II open beta that I realized that Cold Symmetry had a major hit on their hands.

Now that I got to experience the full game, I can confidently say that Mortal Shell II is one of the biggest improvements I have ever seen in a sequel. You can tell that Cold Symmetry took all the negative feedback of the original to heart, as everything from combat to exploration and character progression is improved upon in meaningful ways.

Choose Your Playstyle

The greatest part of Mortal Shell II is its combat and build variety. There are eight Shells to find in the game, an increase from only five in the first game, each with their own unique characteristics and abilities. These Shells have a huge impact on your playstyle and how you go about combat encounters.

Without going into all the Shells in Mortal Shell II, I’ll just cover a couple here. On one hand, Tiel is a Shell that allows you to go invisible for a short period, allowing you to sneak up on an enemy and execute a powerful strike. Meanwhile, Smert halts time, entering into a fight stance, allowing you to unleash a fury of punches that apply a random condition to the enemy.

Each of the Shells in the game comes equipped with a standard ability, which are those mentioned above, and a passive ability that gives you a unique advantage in combat, such as an additional flask that regenerates by killing foes.

I loved how vastly different the abilities of each Shell are in Mortal Shell II. The major difference between each not only motivates you to test out all Shells to see which you like best, but it also encourages you to play through the game a second time with an entirely different playstyle. A Soulslike fails if it doesn’t have replayability due to a lack of build variety, and fortunately, that is not the case here due to the options available to the player.

Build variety is pushed even further when you look at the number of Tarstones, Weapons, and Sidearms available throughout the journey. Each weapon feels considerably different from one another, providing different movesets and attack speed, while Sidearms follow the same principle. My absolute favorite Sidearm is Troubadour’s Lute, a guitar that applies Confusion to enemies, forcing them to attack each other. It’s incredibly cool.

The major difference between each Shell not only motivates you to test out all of them to see which you like best, but it also encourages you to play through the game a second time with an entirely different playstyle.

Tarstones, on the other hand, are essentially this game’s version of Trinkets. There are four categories of Tarstones: Support, Combat, Infusions, and Abilities. Each of these “classes” of Tarstones provides buffs for your character, and since there are so many to find throughout the game, you can truly create a unique build that works for you.

For example, my build is all about dealing as much damage as possible, so I have the Deadeye Stone Tarstone equipped to deal more serious Critical Damage and the Siegebreaker’s Stone to increase Stagger Damage. However, I was previously utilizing Tarstones that leech health from enemies, keeping me in the fight.

In other words, with all the Tarstones, Weapons, Sidearms, and Shells, the combinations are really endless. Just thinking about it gets me excited to play through New Game Plus and try out an entirely different build.

Discover This Expansive World

One of the biggest improvements in Mortal Shell II from the original game is exploration and level layout. This level design is fantastic and is reminiscent of Dark Souls, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Lies of P, and sometimes even Elden Ring. The map is large, incredibly dense with interconnected pathways, filled with points of interest, hidden dungeons, etc.

As I played through my adventure, I noticed that Mortal Shell II has its own take on Elden Ring’s Legacy Dungeons in the form of Corrupted Gates. Each Corrupted Gate leads to a large, full-fledged dungeon with fairly expansive environments, its own distinct atmosphere, and a major boss waiting at the end.

On the other hand, there are minor dungeons in Mortal Shell II that can be found within the environment. These are smaller dungeons that aren’t very unique from one another and can feel kind of “samey,” similar to the caves found throughout Elden Ring.

While a good chunk of the minor dungeons aren’t anything super special in Mortal Shell II, mainly being a small-sized crypt with a puzzle and a handful of enemies, there are some that throw a few surprises the player’s way. For example, I discovered a random dungeon in the environment that led to an underground mine and another that led to a torn-down village.

Each Corrupted Gate leads to a large, full-fledged dungeon with fairly expansive environments, its own distinct atmosphere, and a major boss waiting at the end.

Even though not every minor dungeon adds much to the game, they always have valuable rewards, making them worthwhile. They could contain a Tarstone, coins for purchasing upgrades, a large sum of Gloom for leveling up, etc. In other words, exploring each dungeon you come across is key to making a super powerful character in Mortal Shell II.

The Corrupted Gate dungeons on the main story path are where the game truly shines, though. As previously mentioned, these are massive and have their own identity. One may have you trekking through the snow in a blizzard, while another has you crossing a swamp against poisonous enemies. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through each of these as they all had creative level layouts that encouraged exploration.

However, it’s not just the dungeons that are worth exploring, as the world itself holds many secrets. Throughout the game’s map, you can find combat challenges that reward valuable items, enemy encampments that hold a large amount of gold, easter eggs that call back to the first game, and rarely, mini-bosses.

Overcome the Challenge

A Soulslike needs to excel in its boss fights, as having great boss encounters is a pinnacle of the genre. Luckily, Mortal Shell II does a phenomenal job in this department, as each boss requires patience, learning, and overcoming a great challenge through trial and error. While there are a couple of stinkers throughout the game, most of them are exciting and had my blood pumping.

While the overall feel of combat was my main complaint of the first game, I also felt like the boss fights were underwhelming. If you asked me today, I wouldn’t be able to name any of the bosses from the first game because they simply weren’t memorable or made a lasting impression. However, there are some bosses in the sequel that will go down as Soulslike greats and will please veterans of the genre.

Due to the parry-heavy nature of Mortal Shell II, taking down these bosses is all about mastering the parry system, filling up their stagger bar, and finding an opening to strike. Some of the attack patterns you’ll encounter are so complex that you’ll sometimes have to parry up to a handful of times back-to-back.

Failing at these encounters, returning to the fight with more knowledge of the attack patterns, and then succeeding is always so satisfying. Encountering a boss that makes you go, “I’m never going to beat this” and then genuinely improving with each attempt to finally overcome the challenge is what makes Soulslikes so special and exhilarating. Mortal Shell II knows this and executes this idea phenomenally.

However, the performance issues of Mortal Shell II come to light when encountering these larger foes. There were a handful of times when the boss would become completely idle, not attacking or moving whatsoever, allowing me to wail on it until its health was reduced to zero. This happened way too often and completely ruined some encounters that could have otherwise been really great.

While there is a Day 1 patch in the works that is aiming to fix this issue, it’s hard to predict if the patch will completely remove the problem. I can’t speak to that, and I can only speak on my experience at the time of playing, and unfortunately, bosses becoming idle was quite frequent.

Closing Comments

If Cold Symmetry can fix the bugs that plague some of the bosses, Mortal Shell II will go down as one of the best Soulslikes on the market right now. The improvements over the original make this one of the most impressive sequels I have ever experienced, with the changes being so significant that it feels almost like a reboot of the IP. The combat is fast and brutal, the exploration is rewarding, the build variety is deep, and the world is beautiful at times. All Soulslike fans need to play Mortal Shell II, as it understands exactly what makes this genre so beloved and executes those elements phenomenally.