Slain: Back From Hell

This game is really great. I love the environments and the music. The graphics, even though retro style, look great. In game play is super fun and it reminds me of Altered Beast and Castlevania. Like a true classic, it is pretty hard, but not unfair, and one learns how to deal with the enemies quite fast. This game is well worth the money, I highly recommend it.

The game desperately wants to be a heavy metal Dark Souls, which is to say, be difficult and punishing, but let the player try to get past a difficult part over and over until you get it right. And it delivers. There's less depth to the combat - your choices are pretty much just quick reflexes with your attack, dodge and block buttons - but slaughtering your way through the enemy legions is fun, and the art style is very appealing.

I've beaten two stages (the first one and The Wolfwoods) and I've enjoyed the game for the most part, but it (unsurprisingly) has a lot of aspects that I don't care for. I just started The Highlands, and after a few deaths at the first checkpoint, I've decided I'm probably done with the game. Firstly, I wanted to mention that I like the music, and the controls are actually decent. The game looks great, too. Check points almost never felt too far apart either, which was surprising. As for the things I didn't like... Insta-kills. The game is littered with things that kill you instantly, and it's almost never obvious how they work. More than once I was caught off guard by Bathoryn bursting into bloody chunks. Projectiles coming from off screen is common, and is just as annoying as you'd expect - especially since you die in about 4 hits. Blocking is near useless in terms of damage reduction. The "parry" is strong, but is almost unusable. Apparently the animation timing in the game is off or something, but basically, the timing is almost too tight to be usable. The end of the Wolfwoods was made much easier with it, but getting the timings down was more painful than rewarding. You can't really run past enemies. No one wants to fight things over and over, especially when the only way of fighting them is tedious and time consuming. Running past things doesn't have to be easy, but it's a nice secondary option. The Highlands (so far). Just the first checkpoint run is filled with: an abnormally high number of enemies, multiple monster spawners, tanky enemies that use ranged attacks AND summon monsters endlessly themselves, and flying enemies that you usually can't hit, but shoot projectiles at you anyway. The next checkpoint also seems weirdly far away (I never got to it). If you're wanting something that's stylish, decently fun and challenging, but not necessarily in the "tough but fair" kind of way, I somewhat recommend the game. Otherwise, I'd look elsewhere.

Nice platform game reminds me of blaphemous is that nothing short of perfectly timed blocks will have you killed again and again. Definitely one for those that prefer chalenging to fun. Glad I got whilst on sale.

Slain: Back From Hell is a tough but awesome hack and slash platformer. From the gritty faux-pixel art graphics to the pumping heavy metal soundtrack this game is a joy to look at and listen to. The backgrounds, characters and their animation are brimming with setpieces and cool ideas. The game is tough as nails in some places bet never gets frustrating due to the careful placement of checkpoints. Some sections take some more tries than others but the game offers the perfect balance between difficulty and reward. In a time where the roguelike genre reigns supreme in indie games, I was pleasantly surprised that this game offers a manually designed experience that offers a reward from skilled play that is not lessened by unfair chance encounters. The controls are pretty tight, but could be a smidge tighter. Playing this game on a Playstation controller, I found it necessary to switch to D-Pad controls instead of thumbstick because the game would frequently register a thumbstick release as a short impulse in the opposite direction (missing dead-zone would be my guess), which caused the hero to turn the other way. D-Pad solves this problem though and for a classic game this would be the recommended method of control anyway. The gameplay itself is super fun, in part because the sound effects are very well designed and each hit has a nice crunch to it. There aren't a lot of attacks to choose from but the normal attack chain, the charge attack and the mana shot offer a good range of experimenting to find the right tactic for each combination of enemies. The elemental attacks that are added later in the game require to find each enemy's weakness so there is a good amount of discovery all in all without too much fluff. All in all Slain: Back From Hell was a big surprise for me as I didn't have very big expectations. It has become a personal favourite right away.