I play many different genres of games, but I tend to shy away from souls like games as they tend to completely frustrate me. Recently Whitethorn Games released Slime Heroes, developed by Pancake Game Studios, and I decided it was time to shake off my apprehensions about the genre and expand my gaming portfolio.
You play as a slime that must rid the world of a mysterious corruption that has affected all living creatures. Starting out with just your fists, you will soon gain new weapons, abilities, and elements to combat the growing threat as you liberate the creatures of the world and try to restore balance.
As you progress you will learn new skills that can be combined on the fly, in any way that you want, to help you fight your way through increasingly more difficult enemies. Some of the skills you will acquire are projectiles, whirlwind, meteor shower, barriers, and a whole lot more. You can use these skills alone, or you can combine them. The whirlwind will draw in enemies and damage them for a short period of time. But when combined with the projectile, it will shoot 3 travelling tornadoes. You can then add fire, poison or other elements to increase damage.
The game looks cute and adorable, but don’t let that fool you. Upon starting you are faced with enemies that can easily end your game with just a few hits. This is not a title you can just charge into and expect to succeed. Tactics will play a large part in your success. As well as your wardrobe. You also find hats that will give you buffs, so you are able to customize your character to your unique play style.
Gameplay is simple, beat the enemies and clear the mysterious corruption from the world and save your friend. There are 6 unique areas for you to play through, each one progressively harder. Besides the regular enemies you will have have battle dungeons and puzzle dungeons to contend with. As you defeat enemies you will earn experience that can be used to level up your speed, strength, magic damage, and energy. Just be careful because if you die, you will lose your unspent experience and have to go back to pick it up. Each time you interact with the character that heals you or allows you to upgrade, all monsters are respawned making for even more battling. There are no health pickups in the game, so until you find another way to heal, prepare to resummon enemies often.
Graphics in the game are on the cutesy side. Each of the six areas you fight in are distinct and well realized. I can’t say that they are bright and cheerful, as the swamp area uses its dank environment to add to the ambiance. The game is 3-D, and from a 3rd person perspective high above and behind your character. This works for the most part, but there are a few areas where the lower scenery can block your view. This can add to the frustration factor especially when you fall off a cliff that you didn’t see. There are only a few spots where this can happen, but I am pretty sure I found them all. Twice.
One thing that must be said is that this game has amazing accessibility options. Beyond the normal features for color blindness, motion, and pressing issues, this game includes multiple sliders for game difficulty. For me this feature opens the game up to all gamers. You can decrease the amount of damage done by enemies or the environment, decrease enemy speed, increase the damage that you do, and more. This allows you to customize the game to a level that you are comfortable, or a bit uncomfortable, with. Even if you set up the game to favor the player 100%, there is still a challenge to complete it.
This game also features a co-op mode for local and online play. It is a simple drop in, drop out system that allows you to have friends join for the entire adventure, or just to help you out with a particularly nasty boss. And if one of the players goes down, a quick smack with a sword brings them back into the fight. This makes the gameplay more fluid, and you don’t have to stop to heal them.
The game has been out for a little more than a week at the time of writing, and there are a few issues with the game, and Xbox achievements. As far as the game itself goes, you must beat each boss twice to completely clear an area. The problem is that there is no area to beat the final boss a second time, which locks you out from finishing the game. There also seems to be issues with unlocking several of the Xbox achievements. Getting all the weapons doesn’t seem to trigger the achievement, and of course you can’t get several achievements because you can’t complete the game. These are frustrating, but the developers are working on a patch, so a fix should be incoming soon.
Slime Heroes is available now on Steam and Xbox, and coming soon to Playstation and Nintendo Switch. The game carries a $30 price tag, which can seem a bit hefty for an Indie Game, but given the amount of gameplay is reasonable. Add in that you can play local and online co-op, the accessibility options, and the ability to scale the difficulty to your level, the title is one that should be added to every library, even if you are like me and don’t usually care for souls like games.
