Solasta 2’s early access build is estimated to take anywhere between 10 and 15 hours, but I spent far too long farting around in the character creation engine instead. Like in the first game, you create four custom characters that make up your party for a fantasy adventure using a crunchy system based on Dungeons & Dragons. In this case, your characters were all orphans adopted into the Colwell family, so they can all be a different species.
The first game in the budding franchise from Tactical Adventures, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, had a similar hook, so players could customize a party of four — a novel approach compared to similar games that put a single custom character in a party with various adventurers. In migrating from Unity over to Unreal Engine 5 between the original and its sequel, the level of detail and graphical fidelity is a huge improvement, starting with character creation.
“In the first game, our characters were not that good, so we took a lot of effort to make them look much better and provide a lot of customization for the players,” Tactical Adventures studio head Mathieu Girard told Polygon in a video call, noting that players can select faces and mix them together to create something unique. Everything from scars and freckles to tattoos and eyebrows can be manually adjusted and positioned. Want to give your dwarf frosted tips in his hair? You can do that. What about blonde roots for your elf wizard? Yep. You can randomly generate characters or simply start from scratch.
Solasta 2 also offers six premade heroes — one of each class available with the start of early access. Having fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard, paladin, and sorcerer at launch offers a healthy mix of options. Missing classes like bard and barbarian are in development and will launch as part of future updates. Similarly, players only have access to dwarf, elf, halfling, and human species at first. But that’s just the starting point.
Solasta 2 adapts D&D’s revamped 2024 ruleset, dubbed 5.5e (at least in D&D Beyond, anyway) rather than the version of 5e released in 2014. It’s ostensibly the same system with various tweaks to smooth out progression and make both classes and subclasses more balanced. The most significant change, however, is that character creation refocuses on backgrounds that offer ability score increases and access to origin feats. So the way you make your characters feels different than in games like Crown of the Magister or even Baldur’s Gate 3.
