Slain Expectations

Full disclosure: review copy provided by developer/publisher!

And so like The Lady before it, Steam has sharted out another half-baked indie title for us to enjoy in the waning days of winter – this time it's Slain!, an arcadey, 2D hack n' slash. Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: this isn't an AWFUL game. It looks great... no, it looks SPECTACULAR. This is lovingly crafted stuff: the baddies, the bosses, the backgrounds, the foregrounds, the GROUNDgrounds! It's a slick looking, heavy metal album cover of a game.

But it all falls apart, unfortunately, like a conversation with a beautiful airhead.

“So what kind of hobbies do you have, Slain!?”

“Pizza!”

“Pizza isn't a hobby, Slain.”

“Horses!”

“Alright, we're done here.”

It's just kind of... vapid? That's my biggest complaint, and the most damning, unpatchable one. The combat has no impact... and that's CRITICAL for a hack n' slash. What it lacks in combat depth it should make up for in VIOLENT, RADICAL, FEEL-GOOD COMBAT. It doesn't sound good, and it doesn't feel good. The majority of the game you can spam the attack button and watch as the minions of SATAN crumble like so much tissue paper before your standard sword. Hell, I didn't realize I could switch between elemental weapons or use spirit bombs until halfway through the game (I figured they mentioned fire, ice, and steel as a Game of Thrones reference or something, honestly). I guess that's another issue in and of itself: the game doesn't really explain itself well. “Spirit bombs are great for clearing out tons of enemies!” Thanks game! How in the ♥♥♥♥ do I do that?

And besides all that you run along a fairly linear path, slapping switches and jumping on platforms. It's all very uninspired, save for the brilliant art design. And the story? Forgettable. You play as one Geralt - I mean Bathoryn? And you have been brought back to life to destroy evil? And that's that. Go around and kill evil. And the dialogue is bizarrely disjointed - sometimes they stick to the old timey spiel, sometimes there's a weird modern tone that's just short of "LOL."

This is likely a byproduct of this game having been rushed out the door before it was ready... it was delayed at least twice as far as I know, and it still feels unrefined, unpolished, unfinished. The platforming is MOSTLY okay, but there are some serious spatial issues with some platforms (lookin' at you Wolfswood Caves with your stupid aggravating smashy, insta-death falls if you don't jump on the last frickin' pixel of a GOD DAMN LEDGE ♥♥♥♥). The enemies all look cool, but they're just so much fodder – even the bosses. Slash 'em, run around 'em, slash 'em, rinse and repeat, dead. I seldom had to dodge, just casually smack them as they (in futility) try and break through my attack spamming.

Despite there being checkpoints, if you quit out of the game during a level you have to start the whole damned thing over again – and some of the more frustrating, platformy ones can take a substantial amount of time. If you decide you have somewhere else to be don't quit out until you actually beat the damned boss. Once you beat an area you're free to explore, replay a level... but why would you? It's mostly linear, the combat is unsatisfying, and the “puzzles” aren't all that puzzley.

At the end of the day this is a gussied up pig. It looks AMAZING – but wipe away the makeup and you'll see it's a Berkshire boar with beady little soulless eyes. Even if they fix the myriad of issues (achievements, control issues, sound issues, typos) this is one to avoid unless heavily discounted.

These are my impressions of Slain! Hopefully viewed as constructive critism. I experienced some frustration that has taken me away from enjoying the game. I do think with some improvement though this title still has the potential to be fantastic.

Though here are my current thoughts of the game as it stands during the writing of this:

Pros:
- Amazing visual style and animation
- The settings look alive, they are real visual treats
- Great soundtrack

Cons:
- Lacks crucial sound effects. For example: no sounds from enemy projectiles, sounds that accompany enemy movements or strikes or large area of effect attacks. Your character doesn't make a sound when being hit... so no " ugh's" or what have you (or at least not any that I could discern).

- Character move sets don't seem compatible with the game around you, there's a combo and dodge system that don't seem to work with how the enemies in the game world function.

- Enemies don't seem to have a "tell" that would help identify when to use the dodge ability.

- Enemies will always hit you no matter how you strike or if a combo is being executed. Other issues with this is that enemies will clip through you and/or anchor you somehow (or in some cases get stuck in you), especially in mobs, which is ok in concept but the problem is that the game mechanics don't allow you to escape this. This also causes the dodge ability to fail in mid execution, which renders dodging pointless.

- The dodge button would greatly benefit to being tied with the directional input. Dodging is tied to the direction you're facing, so if you're facing large amounts of enemies sometimes you'll frantically be facing different directions which might make you end up "dodging" into an enemy, not away from it.

- Even though button mashing is discouraged, the combo system isn't fluid or responsive enough to tackle enemies adequately, especially in groups or with larger fiends. Your character animations will be interrupted and you will sustain damage by proxy. So I found that if I switch back to the regular sword and then hammer on the attack button you'll end up progressing much further than doing it the way the game was intending you to.

- A big problem for me is that I don't always understand why or how I died in a combat situation. The lack of sound effects and a visual sign of impact, you'll find that your health has been drained and you' re back at a checkpoint often and with a feeling that things aren't working correctly which leads to a lot of frustration.

- A lack of weight in execution from the main character and enemies, feels like even though you're being hit or they're being hit, it has a lack of substance to it (it's hard to describe). Like there isn't like a knockback on your character or the enemies, you'll swing your sword but it doesn't feel effective. When you're being hit you'll just have to take the games word for it via the health bar that you have been hit (if that makes sense?).

It looks like the devs are going to be patching the game up, so hopefully things will get fixed up. The game is just shy of hitting the mark at the moment.

Early Kickstarter backer and shower-offer-to-friends-er, with rather hurt feelings about it all

During development, update-after-update showed new sprites or boasted new music but rarely if ever info on combat, gameplay, enemy AI.

That fact says it all.

Cringing from the writing (which is so bad it seems like an active attempt to *sabotage* the game), even before I got to experience the extremely painful controls and terrible combat.

Music is really cool for a few minutes but 30 mins in, it was getting very very repetitive.

== And the long rant version of this review: ==

The controls are fundamentally painful. You have to hold a button down for about a second just to turn around, due to mistakenly implemented analog sensitivity in Unity even when using a keyboard. Attack combos are an inconsistent mish-mash. I think that duck is the same as block but you're better off trying to bash the attack button since blocking only works on projectiles--meaning if fighting melee & ranged opponents simultaneously, blocking gets you killed.

After pressing every key on my keyboard I found a cool looking fireball which was semi-useful.

Earn mana by using 'decapitate' button (W key--you're welcome) but it only works on enemies with very low HP, and it's slow and short-ranged and leaves you vulnerable. It seems to me to be essentially useless since you can't gauge enemy HP (unless you count the hits you've made and know how many it takes, but that's nearly impossible when fihgting 2-3 at once). Even if one of the enemies in a group is low enough, using decap means you'll almost certainly be hit 1-2x by the other guys.

Attempting to hit an enemy and then run or run and turn around and attack again is entirely futile, due to the terrible turn-around speed and very very clunky controls. The dodge key itself didn't prove useful enough to bother with due to the clunkiness (approach enemy, attack, dodge--you're likely to be hit before your attack finishes and the dodge executes).

Fortunately, I was able to dispatch groups of enemies by simply standing on a raised ledge, watching them walk endlessly into it, and attacking them whilst crouching. Take that, mindless undead!

My general feeling about the combat was that MAYBE it would be possible to game it perfectly and get past enemies by maintaining a specific distance, attacking, dodging backward, attacking again but I'm no slouch and after many many lives lost, found it nearly impossible to defeat groups without sustaining damage.

I got so frustrated by the controls after what what was probably my 20th attempt at getting past a section leading up to the "red skelly" right after entering the 1st temple that I closed the game so can't comment any further.

I'll try to check back after some patches have been released in a month or two, and hopefully get a bit further and be able to write a nicer review.

Damn the art is great, though. Still a very inspiring game in that regard.

Yeah it looks good and sounds great at first, but there are alot of turn offs that will ruin your experience. Let me list of some things before I even get started.

1. The combat is good up till you go up against enemies that take way too many hits which is up to the level with the wolf knight guys.

2. Pixel perfect jumps to avoid instant death which you may end up dieing due to not being able to do that. You will lose mana alot due to that too so good luck keeping it.

3. Too much frustrating and unnecessery enemies that do way too much damage or lock you in attacks making it impossible to do enough damage to kill anything.

4. Dodging and timing it a complete joke the backdash barely works and if your lucky you might not get hit. If lucky by a miracle you even can get past an overpowered enemy.

5. If you quit out of the game you have to restart the entire level all over again and also no checkpoint you start from either.

This is considered a metroidvania type of game? There is not even a speck of any kind of that in this false tagged game. This game is basically 2D Dark Souls, but without the leveling, equipment to help with unbeatable fights or barely beatable, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ dodging that barely does save your ♥♥♥, and will make you tear your hair out or smash your computer due to the unnecessarily difficult broken enemies or enviroment. If your a masochist or glutton for punishment then enjoy this nightmare of game. I only made it through the prologue and then tried the two other areas, before finally giving up on the wolf ruins part. I rather not cause my anger to raise anymore then it needs to along with my blood-pressure.

Plus went back to it to see if I could get through the game some more turns out the achievements didn't register when I beat the Thorn boss and the Banshee Queen. This game is pretty much broken as ♥♥♥♥. Plus why even have ice and fire enhancement pickups if you can select them with your control-pad or joystick? Not that they help anyways since the axe is pretty much the only useful weapon in the game since it can do more knockback and you pretty much have to relay on cheap spamming attacks. I complained about the combat being bad, but I forgot to mention about the unkillable blood wolf which I got to in the wolf level. I swear to god you cannot even kill it at all I tried using the axe and also the other weapon types. Yet none of them do anything at all plus the blood wolf sometimes respawns even if you don't kill the wolf knights or guard or whatever the hell you wanna call them. For the love of god this is too broken to play.

I really wanted to like and recommend this game. The art looks excellent, animations look fluid, the sound is ok too, I myself had been keeping an eye on this game for a while which makes writing this review kind of sad.

Where the game drops the ball is the gameplay. There are so many problems even playing the game the way the devs recommended, with a controller and everything the game still feels unresponsive, the hit detection feels awkward, trying to do anything after getting hit ended up being more of a gamble than anything else, there isn't any post hit invicibility or a considerable push back to give you space. Which means you won't always know for sure if you're getting hit until a monster brutally murders you in two or three hits. The dodge move was useless due to the start-up frames leaving you open to getting hit since it takes a bit to actually move away, attacking is actually quicker.
Speaking of attacking, even the input of the basic combo doesn't always respond as it should making it another gamble if you're trying to cancel the combo into a decapitation move to restore mana, sometimes I managed to pull it off perfectly but most times it felt like the game just refused to do it and it would either stop around the second hit or do the normal 3-hit combo despite me pressing the button only twice. Also getting the first hit due to how the controls respond also felt like I was making a bet rather than being skillful.
It all feels very loose, devoid of necessary feedback to the player. It needs to have tighter, more responsive controls that would allow to pull off moves and possibly tactics well which even if they pulled off I'm sure it would retain the level of challenge they were going for. But as it stands, during release, the game is difficult for the wrong reasons and quite a shame too since I really can't give it enough praises over how good and different it looks.

If you want a challenging 2D Platformer you're better off playing Volgarr the Viking or classics like the 2D Castlevanias, at least there the controls respond perfectly and the whole game feels tighter and meatier. Hopefully the devs will take the feedback and either patch this while looking at where other games got it right or do a better job on their next game. Personally I would like to see them fix this game by overhauling the gameplay and if they do I'd consider playing it all the way.