Quick answer: Dolmen is a rough, short, sci-fi soulslike from a tiny Brazilian team, and almost every review that panned it in 2022 ended with the same sentence: it is not worth $39.99. That sentence is now out of date. The list price is $19.99 and it drops to $1.99 in sales that run most months of the year. At that price a ten hour game with good boss fights and clumsy everything else becomes an easy yes. At full price it never was.
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
Read the 2022 reviews of Dolmen and you notice something odd. The criticism is savage, but it keeps circling back to the same complaint, and it is not really about the game. TechRaptor, Gaming Nexus, GameTyrant, Niche Gamer and plenty of others all land on some version of "this is not worth forty dollars". One said flatly that there was no way it was worth $20, let alone $40.
Four years later the list price is $19.99 and Steam has been discounting it to $1.99 for several days in most months. The single loudest objection in the entire critical reception has quietly been resolved by the storefront.
So that is what this review is about. Not whether Dolmen is good, because it mostly is not. Whether it is worth two dollars, which is a completely different question and one nobody has bothered to answer.
Buy it from a legitimate store. Dolmen is a commercial game sold on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox, and when it is on sale it costs less than a cup of coffee. Downloading a cracked copy from a file host exposes you to malware, gives you no patches and no multiplayer, and takes money from a five person studio that funded this thing partly through a Kickstarter that raised about $20,000. There is no version of this where piracy makes sense at a two dollar price point.
What it actually scored
| Source | Score | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Metacritic, PS5 | 60 | 30 critics. 20% positive, 60% mixed, 20% negative |
| Metacritic, PC | 55 | Xbox Series around 57, PS4 around 55 |
| OpenCritic | 58, rated Weak, only 13% recommend | bottom 14th percentile of all games on the site |
| Metacritic users | 6.4 | only 41 ratings. Higher than the critics |
| Steam | Mixed, around 55% positive | only about 275 reviews in four years |
The spread between individual reviews is enormous, which is a signal in itself. The Enemy and Hey Poor Player both went to 80. GGRecon gave it 3 out of 10. TechRaptor gave it 4.5. One outlet went as low as 20. When a game splits critics that violently it usually means the good parts and the bad parts are not mixed together but sitting in separate piles, and that is exactly what is happening here.
Note the direction of the user gap too. Players rated it higher than critics did, which is the reverse of what normally happens to a disappointing release. Those user numbers come from tiny samples, 41 ratings on Metacritic and about 275 on Steam across four years, so do not lean on them hard. But a lot of those positive reviews explicitly mention having bought it in a sale.
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
The price maths, which is the whole argument
Reviewers put the campaign at around ten hours, with roughly fifteen if you chase every achievement. There is no New Game Plus, so that is your lot. Here is what that costs per hour at every price this game has actually sold for, calculated for this article.
| Price | When | Per hour over 10 hours | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| $39.99 | launch, May 2022 | $4.00 | what every critic refused to recommend |
| $19.99 | current list price | $2.00 | still a bit much for this |
| $1.99 | the 90% sale, which runs most months | $0.20 | buy it |
| around $1.51 | lowest recorded third party price | $0.15 | buy it twice |
Twenty cents an hour. For context, a game you paid $70 for and played for forty hours costs you $1.75 an hour. Dolmen at a deep discount is roughly nine times better value per hour than a well-received full price release, and that is before you account for the fact that the ten hours include six or seven genuinely good boss fights.
This does not make Dolmen a good game. It makes it a cheap one, and cheapness is a legitimate reason to play something. The critics were not wrong in 2022. The storefront simply moved underneath their conclusion.
Check the date before you buy. Steam price tracking shows Dolmen at $1.99 for somewhere between two and twelve days in most months, and at full price for the rest. May 2026 had no discount at all. If you land on the store page and it says $19.99, wait. Another sale is almost always a few weeks away. Prices and sale timing also vary by region and storefront, so check your own.
What is genuinely good
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
The boss fights. This is the thing almost every reviewer agreed on, including the ones who hated everything else. The bosses have readable attack patterns, several have proper second phases, and they feel like real soulslike encounters rather than damage sponges. More interestingly, Dolmen lets you refight them. Collect Dolmen Fragments and you can go back and farm a boss for the materials that build its unique weapon. That is a genuinely good idea the genre mostly does not do.
The gun and the energy system. Dolmen gives you a ranged weapon that draws from an energy bar rather than ammunition, and that bar regenerates as long as you are not spending it on healing or special attacks. You can swap to an over the shoulder aim instantly and the transition is clean. The Reactor mode burns the same energy to add an elemental blast to your melee swings and strip enemy resistances. When you are juggling melee, gun and Reactor against a boss, the game briefly becomes the thing it was pitched as.
The crafting loop. You harvest materials from enemy corpses and spend Nanites, the souls equivalent, building armour and weapons from what you carried out. For a lot of players this turned out to be the most compelling part of the game, more so than the combat it feeds.
The art direction, in flashes. The cosmic horror and hard sci-fi blend is a real idea and the concept work behind Revion Prime is better than the budget it was executed on. If you want a soulslike that nails atmosphere on a small budget instead, our Trek to Yomi review covers one that got the presentation right and the combat wrong, which is almost the exact mirror image of this.
What is genuinely bad
Melee combat lacks impact. This is the most common complaint in the entire review set. Animations are stiff, hit detection is unreliable, and heavy attacks have wind-ups so long that the enemy has hit you, absorbed your blow and hit you again before you recover. When your gun is both safer and faster than your sword, the melee half of a melee game is already lost.
There is no map. On linear stretches this is survivable. In the hub areas, where you flip a console and the camera vaguely gestures at a door that opened somewhere, it turns navigation into running laps until you stumble into the right corridor. No map, no meaningful signposting, and nothing marking which locked door matters.
The environments repeat. There are four or five biomes and almost all of them funnel back into the same experimental laboratory corridors. A small team had to reuse assets, which is understandable, but the result is a world that feels like rooms holding enemies rather than a place.
Enemy health pools are inflated. Basic enemies soak absurd numbers of hits while dealing heavy damage, which is artificial difficulty rather than designed difficulty. The elemental rock paper scissors system between fire, ice and acid is the intended answer, and it helps, but you have to work that out yourself.
It is rough. Enemies run past you at nothing. The sandworm encounter can launch you into the sky. Dialogue scenes look a console generation behind the rest of the game. Reviewers reported framerate drops heavy enough to interfere with dodge timing, and at least one player reported visual glitches that only appeared in the final act.
Two things that will ruin a run, so plan around them. There is no respec. Once you spend skill points you cannot reclaim them, and players have reported reaching a wall late in the game purely because of a build chosen in the first hour. Spread your early points rather than committing hard. And there is no New Game Plus, so when the credits roll that is the end. Plan one build, finish it, move on.
Who made it, and why that matters here
Massive Work Studio is a small Brazilian team, founded in 2016 by developers who had worked on larger projects elsewhere. Dolmen was their first game. It went through a Kickstarter that raised roughly $20,000 from 585 backers, which is a rounding error by commercial standards, and was eventually published by Prime Matter, the Koch Media label.
That context does not excuse a $39.99 launch price, and the Brazilian outlet The Enemy calling it one of the most ambitious projects in the country's games history is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But it does explain the shape of the problems. These are not the failures of a team that did not care. They are the failures of five or so people building a genre that normally needs a hundred, and then being priced against games that had them.
Buy, wait or skip
| You are | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A soulslike completist | Buy at $1.99 | Ten hours and some real boss design for twenty cents an hour. Easy call |
| Looking at it near $19.99 | Wait | It discounts 90% most months. There is no reason to pay ten times the sale price |
| New to soulslikes | Skip | Unreliable hit detection and inflated enemy health will teach you the wrong lessons. Start elsewhere |
| Here for the horror | Skip | Multiple reviewers noted the horror never really arrives. It is a sci-fi dungeon, not a scare |
| You want a sci-fi soulslike specifically | Try The Surge or Hellpoint first | Several reviewers named both as doing this better. Come to Dolmen after |
| Playing with a friend | Worth a look | There is online co-op for boss fights. Sources disagree on whether it supports two or four, so confirm before buying for a group |
| Easily frustrated by jank | Skip | The roughness is structural and four years of patches did not remove it |
Verdict: Dolmen is a mediocre game with a handful of good ideas trapped inside it, and the critics who scored it in the fifties were being fair. What has changed is the only variable they all complained about. A game nobody could recommend at $39.99 is a perfectly reasonable weekend at $1.99, and the boss fights, the energy driven gunplay and the crafting are worth that several times over. Wait for the sale, spread your skill points, accept that the melee will never feel right, and you will get ten decent hours out of it. Just do not pay list price, and do not expect to be scared.
Frequently asked questions
Is Dolmen worth playing?
At $1.99, yes, for anyone who likes soulslikes and can tolerate rough edges. At the $19.99 list price, no. At the original $39.99, no critic recommended it and neither do we.
How long is Dolmen?
Around ten hours for the story across three acts, closer to fifteen if you are chasing all thirty achievements. There is no New Game Plus.
Can I reset my skill points?
No. There is no respec in Dolmen. Players have reported hitting a wall late in the game because of a build chosen early, so avoid over-committing to one stat in the opening hours.
Does Dolmen have co-op?
Yes, online co-op built around boss fights. Published sources disagree on the maximum party size, with some saying two players and others four, so verify on your platform's store page if you are buying specifically to play together.
Is Dolmen actually scary?
Not really. It is marketed as cosmic horror and the concept art supports that, but several reviewers pointed out that the horror amounts to enemies appearing around corners. Treat it as sci-fi action, not a horror game.
Is it better than The Surge or Hellpoint?
No. Multiple reviewers recommended both of those ahead of it, and that advice still holds. Dolmen is the one you play third, when it is nearly free.
Was the game ever patched?
Yes. Massive Work Studio shipped a day one patch and several fix rounds through mid 2022 addressing boss rewards, multiplayer bugs and various exploits. The core complaints about melee feel and level design were never resolved.
What platforms is it on?
PC via Steam, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One and Series X and S. It runs on Unreal Engine 4 and shipped with Intel XeSS support on PC.
Where to go next
- Dolmen shared a "worst reviewed of 2022" list with another game we have covered. Read our Kamiwaza Way of the Thief review for the other side of that year.
- For a low budget game that nailed style and fumbled combat, see Trek to Yomi.
- Also from the same 2022 run, our Destroy All Humans 2 Reprobed review.
- Another small team swinging above its weight: F.I.S.T. Forged In Shadow Torch.
- If atmosphere on a tight budget is what you are after, try SIGNALIS or Saturnalia.
- On why budget action games keep landing like this, read why AAA games are not fun anymore.
- Browse the RPG, Action, Horror and Adventure hubs.
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