Best Soulslike Games With Competitive Multiplayer

It’s rare for there to be a Soulslike game completely devoid of multiplayer aspects. That asynchronous interaction is what makes up so much of the joy of the Soulslike genre, the unexpected challenges that can appear at a moment’s notice. Don’t you just wish you could challenge someone to a fair battle one-on-one though?

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In these Soulslike games, the PvP aspect of multiplayer has been given more of an emphasis to really let you test your skills against a real human being. Many of these systems are still retrofitted from the foundational asynchronous elements, but they give you a chance to take out the random element for some good old-fashioned brawling.

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Salt And Sacrifice

Salt and Sanctuary was one of the first indie games to really capitalise on the fledgling Soulslike genre, on a smaller scale in a side-scrolling environment. It’s long-awaited sequel, Salt and Sacrifice, builds upon it in many ways, introducing many of the multiplayer aspects that defined FromSoftware’s own Souls games.

Salt and Sacrifice functions much like Dark Souls in that there are a series of factions you can join, each of them treating the multiplayer experience somewhat differently. These factions let you invade, be invaded, help others and so on. Of course, you can bypass all of that entirely by manully using a Crimson Candle to find an invader to intentionally battle, too.

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Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

Team Ninja are some of the finest creators of Soulslike game next to FromSoftware themselves, but with the flair of character-action heritage mixed in. While the Nioh games overall are mostly simplistic in terms of PvP action, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty offers up a completely different combat system, one that at first glance wouldn’t seem to work well for PvP.

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Wo Long is centered around deflection like Sekiro, with the balancing of your Spirit key to the amount of damage you take, but also the abilities you can use. It is a constant risk-reward system that promotes playing defensively, at the risk of becoming too passive and letting your opponent build up a high Spirit for a powerful finishing blow. You do need to randomly invade, but these duels become more focused than manic once they begin.

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Lords Of The Fallen

After a rather extended development cycle, many swaps of developers, and then being turned into a reboot rather than a sequel, Lords of the Fallen finally released. It is a decidedely adequate game, though one that at least understands the fundamentals of the Soulslike genre better than others. In that same vein, the multiplayer operates much like the Souls games that inspired it.

To the credit of Lords of the Fallen, the degree of build variety lets you really make some diverse characters that make invasions refreshing. You can also set multiplayer codes to bypass some of the random elements of the system to allow a friend or others invade you for a good a fair duel.

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Elden Ring

With FromSoftware’s own Souls games, there has been a silent admission with each subsequent entry that the multiplayer aspects could be deepened. While Dark Souls 1 laid all the foundations, the diversity of the system and additional player control only deepened with each entry, until we finally reached Elden Ring.

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Like its previous entries, Elden Ring has the typical invasion system and the ability to summon others to help you. It also later got a dedicated PvP arena, allowing you to challenge a single player, or even engage in team battles and set certain criteria to fit the battle to your interests. It gives everyone a relatively even playing field, and works fast since it has an actual matchmaking queue.

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Nioh

The original Nioh still stands as one of the greatest Soulslikes the genre has produced, taking some of the core tenets and turning it into more of a frenetic experience with much deeper combat systems. It also added a rather controversial gear system that allows some extreme min-maxing. This can be great for the PvE experience, though perhaps not so for the PvP one.

In the original Nioh, PvP had two dedicated modes. You could use your actual gear values, letting the efforts of your grinding really show. This was, as you might expect, severely unbalanced. There was a second mode to counter this, letting you choose from pre-built kits and evening out stats. This let you actually play to your own strengths, though you just had to hope you didn’t come across a Spear player.

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Dark Souls 2

Since its inception, Dark Souls 2 has been the black sheep of the series. It is the most detached in terms of style and design, yet offers up a different vision as a result of that. Among the many changes it has, its increased focus on multiplayer is the most notable. Covenants return, though with such an absurd diversity that it’s almost comedic.

There are covenants for summoning invaders, for defending against invaders, and even covenants that cause players to be dragged into your world so you can defeat them. PvP covenants make up the bulk of these in Dark Souls 2, and plenty are used for distinct PvP purposes. The Dragon Remnants is the most PvP focused, allowing you to place an invasion summon sign to engage in a duel without even needing to be Human.

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