Osta Hack, Slash, Loot

For a brief moment I couldn't decide whether this game is just too hard or game design is severely flawed.

Now I've come to a conclusion - this game is VERY flawed. It's pure RNG, even the knowledge you gain by trying to beat it will be countered by incredible randomness.

It doesn't give you a sense of progression, you either get lucky or not.

As of this writing, 49% of the reviews for this game are positive. This is frankly, to me inexplicable as this is the worst game in my library of 90 so far. What makes this game obnoxiously bad, egregiously terrible is that it has surface appeal. It deceives the experienced player of roguelikes into thinking that strategic and thoughtful play will be rewarded if one can intuit the subtle rules of the game. Don't waste your time. There is no depth of gameplay here. For example, you find a potion. Will it hurt you or heal you? It's random. It might give you a permanent defect. Or it might heal you. There is no way to tell unless you drink it. Intelligent decision making in this game amounts to not wasting a precious minute of your life on this cynical trap created by a soulless programmer whose only goal was to part you from your hard earned money. It is one of the most offensively designed games I ever played in my life. I am passionate in my hatred of this game. Good day sir or madam.

Alright, I tried to like this game, I really did. Normally I can get some enjoyment out of rogue-like or rogue-lite games. Hard games are fine. Games like Demon's Souls or Dark Souls? Great fun. But Dark Souls has a design philosophy that makes sense. If you die, it's your own fault. You're punished for your own failures. But this game? It's basically just a coin flip that determines whether you win a fight or not. You're punished for things you have no control over.

I think the biggest point of failure is the lack of a maximum health stat. Sure health is there, but the problem is it is finite, and can only be replenished by picking up a random enchantment from a scroll or potion or what have you. And keep in mind that it's random whether or not you find a scroll and random again whether or not this scroll will heal you. It could even be detrimental and hurt you instead. Basically if you get unlucky and take too much damage in combat? You're hooped. You have no chance. The point of health in most games is to give you a chance to survive even if you get unlucky.

There's additional classes that you can unlock, but the game is so entranced with being obtuse that it doesn't tell you at all how to unlock them. I unlocked one somehow and the game didn't even inform me that I had. I only found out when I returned to the main menu and found another class just sitting there.

There is a lot of rogue-like worth your time and money. This is unfortunately not that game. All is luck based , that's it,that's all. It could have been great with just some little ajustements. But currently i don't see where i have an impact on the game.

A good roguelike is characterized by providing you limited resources and abilities, but presenting situations where your choices among those resources and abilities are generally meaningful and significant to your survival and progress. Hack, Slash, Loot does not understand this, limiting options to the point where the game may as well be a linear corridor occasionally blocked off by an enemy or a small numeric increase. I cannot stress how disappointed I am that I gave this developer my money.

No strategy or interest. Just click and hope for the best. D

This game is definately not what I look for in a roguelike. I think I got it in a bundle and was very unimpressed. It's possible this game will be fun for some people, but the itemization and gameplay is very very basic. Feels like a phone game or something. Just one mans opinion largely colored my my hopes and expectations.

I looked forward to a challenging game, what I got was 2.x hours of pure frustration. If I wanted to fight this hard for something I would have started an argument with my mother-in-law over anything family related and would have still had an easier time.

To quote some people on just one of the threads in the forums:-
“I've played a lot of rogue-likes, and it's one of the most unfair, least skill based, unreasonable rogue-likes I've ever played, to the point that a lot of fans of the genre refuse to even count it.”

“Almost threw my CPU out the window.”

“This sums up my experience with this game. It's almost as if you were supposed to die...”

If I could get my money back I would, this is harder than trying to please a crowd of 200 old people with their dietary requirements. I can not slam this enough. Stay away.

If you want to have an idea of how random this game is, then press ctrl + f (cmd + f on a Mac) and type "random".

I love many "random" games, but like it has been pinpointed in other reviews, in such games you're essentially learning from your mistakes and experience, one's own self "out of character xp level" experience that adds to your skills and perception by grasping the mechanics of the game. In such games, you're rewarded progressively by the experience you have gathered in earlier play-throughs and in every new game you're becoming better, not because you're upgrading a character from the game (Rogue Legacy I am looking at you!) but because you're comprehending better how the game is actually working. That leads to the conclusion that the deeper the mechanics of a game, the more rewarding the feeling of satisfaction you're getting from it.

Unfortunately, 'Hack, Slash, Loot' is not such a game, in all of the above statements.

This game feels like it should have potential, but ultimately, it feels too random for you to be able to control and survive what the game throws at you. You unlock characters by dying, or beating missions. Eventually it feels like a grind to unlock the better characters that you can play. I did get several hours of entertainment out of it, but if you're looking for a good roguelike, I'd look at the free options available, like DCSS or TE4

Not for me. "run in a random room, take a random stuff, die from a random mob, loop". It's hard to call it a gameplay

Don't waste your time, game is fueled entirely by RNG. No amount of skill will let you overcome this. I regret that it took me 6 hours to realize this.

Not actually fun. It's basically fake-difficulty. It's not truely roguelike, where you have a chance of surviving for a long while if you play well. Instead it just throws everything at you, everything seems to do much more damage than your character, nothing (especially the stats) is particularly explained well, and you get near-constantly swarmed by enemies (and will often miss just about everything in combat) for very little reward- the loot seems...pretty depressing, for a game that actually includes "loot" in the title.

Horrible game. Completely random. Often you will load a new game and die before ever leaving the first room. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. No amount of skill can make up for the randomness of this game. Don't waste your time with this one. There are many other games available that do what this one does only much better. This is about as much fun as tic tac toe, and about as strategic too.

Hack, Slash, Loot: A game that has a interesting name and looks fun but is just a nightmare.
Random generated rooms and items based on pure luck that does not exist.
In my personal eperience on the 2 hour i wasted on this i would say dont bother paying a penny or spending a second on it.
Rating this game 0 out of 10 .

This game, as every single one, has its pros and cons. But its difference with other games is that what some people consider pros are considered as cons by others. The main point of the game is to go through random rooms, get random objects and killing random enemies to keep going, with very simple controls. This thing of not being able to plan anything can be seen as something bad, but it's part of the charming of the game, and makes it a little bit different from others. It's a good game if the only thing you want is to spend some time playing without thinking very much, but don't expect anything deeper than killing random enemies and picking objects that can make you stronger or weaker. Worth trying it, but maybe not at its full price.

Meh...everything in this game is random. Everything. From the level generation to attacking and being attacked. You could literally die from the first rat you fight if your random luck is bad enough. I started one game where I spawned, opend the first door , and was greeted with about 7 enemies that swarmed me from the surrounding rooms. All of which got to take shots at me while I had to focus on one hoping I could get some quick kills. Of course I "Missed" about the first 4 turns I had so the game lasted 12 seconds before I died. It is basiclaly just a game of chance that you hope you will acquire some fantastic weapon, or gear randomly and you hopefully don't get hit every time you have to fight something before you can hit them. You can't really run away from anything unless you get a double move item.

It's just not that good and I wouldn't recommend it to roguelike fans at all. There is little to no "skill" involved in this game, and you will see no progression in which you feel like you are getting better at the game. If you like playing games that can only be beaten by having a lucky day, thengo for it. If you want a challenge and feel like you beat something based on skill...don't bother.

Idle this game for the cards if you happened to buy it in some crap bundle and don't even bother playing it while you do that.

Hack, Slash, Loot is a simple dungeon crawling roguelike that keeps everything minimal: the graphics are low resolution, the characters are limited, the story is basic. However, this is not its weakness. The gameplay can be awkward with the mouse, and bearable with the keyboard. What ruins it the most though, is the awful game mechanics where constant misses send your character to the grave randomly, and most of the times prematurely. Sadly, it fails to entertain even those looking for some casual retro fun.

I strongly recommend you avoid this rogue-like. Since I can't really think of any pros that this game contributes to the genre, I'm just going to talk about the flaws.

This game is BRUTAL. I know rogue-likes are supposed to have you constantly die over and over but at least you make progress and learn a little more about the game each time you play through. However, I don't feel this way at all when playing this game. Well okay, I learned one thing.

This game practically eliminates 1/3 of your class choices. By attacking with warrior-like classes, you're guaranteed to miss most of your attacks and die within 3 minutes. With ranged classes, you, for whatever reason, have a higher accuracy and don't run as high a risk of getting hit, even with your health being low.

Speaking of which, it's almost impossible to get back any health you lose. In other games you find potions to restore your health and your armor is actually an important statistic. However, in this game, the potions are extremely rare, they don't always give you health (and the ones I've found give less than 10 HP), and with as much armor as I could find, I was still taking FIFTEEN damage from an enemy on the first floor of the game! Also, you start off with either 20, 30, or 40 HP, so...

Speaking of the floors in this game, the chances of completing a floor, or even moving on to the next floor, are low, really low. These floors are massive, and while that may not be the worst thing, there's no inventory system, and consider the flaws I've mentioned before. I've gotten to the second floor ONCE out of all my playthroughs, and naturally I lasted no more than a minute. My luck, huh?

Speaking of luck, the biggest problem is the randomized generation this game has. I'm not thrilled with starting a game, having two enemies appear in front of me, me missing my attacks, and dieing without making A SINGLE MOVE. Also, like I said before with the damage, I don't find it really fair that an enemy on the first floor could whittle down a chunk of my health before even going through more than five rooms.

Hack, Slash, Loot has almost no redeeming qualities. Seriously. The pixel art looks cool and retro for a couple of minutes but there is no variation on the blue tileset. What you see in the screenshots, that's it. Blue.

There is no strategy to it, you cannot avoid monsters once you've seen them and combat is random. That means you're playing a dice simulator and hoping to roll only winning numbers. There is nothing more, you can't hide, you can't change from melee to ranged fighting you have no inventory and can't heal after fights. You can't even run away because evey character moves at the exact same speed.

Gameplay-wise there are just two tyes of enemy. Those that do random damage from a distance and those that do random damage up close. Again that's it. There's no space for depth of play, roll a dice and hope.

The strange view angle sometimes makes it difficult to tell if you're standing next to something or one square away from it and also sometimes hides cupboards behind walls. A minor gripe but gvien Hack, Slash, Loot does nothing right it all adds up to a pretty terrible experience.

Lastly - and for me the most frustrating - is the 'animation'. One character moves at a time, if there are 8 serfs around you and a bunch of demons then you've got to wait for each one to do their little bobbing movement. Similarly with ranged combat, if you're firing at an archer on the other side of the map it degenerates into a very slow game of ping-poing as the arrow crosses the screeon one way and then crosses the screen the other.

Play 'Doom the Roguelike' instead. It's free and it's awesome. Hack, Slash, Loot is neither.