Slain: Back From Hell

I had fun with the game. The soundtrack is great, the gameplay feels smooth and once you master the combat, it can make you feel pretty badass. You eventually get 3 different weapons which are both strong and weak against particular enemies, encouraging switching them on the fly to adapt to the situation The pixel art is actually good and pretty gory. No problems there. The length of the game is the main offender here. It took me exactly 199 minutes to complete it. Definitely would have liked for the ride to take at least a few hours longer. When it comes to controls and difficulty, I had 0 issues completing the game on a keyboard. Played and controlled perfectly fine. As for the difficulty, there are only really a few enemies that can be troublesome, until you learn the proper tactics to deal with them. Your biggest enemy will probably be the environment. It is littered with traps that instantly kill you and any fall out of bounds is instant death too. Luckily, the checkpoints are mostly placed well (there were some spots where they were pretty far apart though) and after every death, you are healed to full. You can usually take a decent amount of hits from enemies before dying, so there is plenty of room for error. I felt the difficulty was actually spot on which considering that there are no difficulty options, is quite an accomplishment. Overall, I'd give it a 7 out of 10. If it were longer, it could have easily been an 8.

This game is hard and will take some practice to "git good," but at the end of the day it just feels tedious and repetitive. The levels all feel the same, just with re-skinned enemies. The four weapons and magic types have the same issue; the differences between them are too slight to matter. There is only one attack “combo” you can do, but it devolves into just mashing the attack button in the same three press pattern all the time. That being said, the blocking, dodging, and countering system in this game does feel good, and learning how to defend against the different enemies feels very rewarding. The visuals and music are both very good, and they both play into a cohesive heavy metal theme. The rest of the game just seems to fall short, there are no items to collect, no secrets to find, and no upgrades to choose. The levels are just a lot of flat surfaces to fight on, but never become anything more than that. There are some “traps” that you have to avoid, but all of them are so obvious that they become trivial, especially since they never seem to be placed where combat takes place. There is just not enough variety in any part of this game to keep the player motivated, and despite doing a few things well there isn't enough here to recommend it.

The review was made after the game was reworked and all of its updates had been applied. First of all, although Slain technically supports controlling your character with the keyboard, in actual practice, it is unplayable while using it. So if you don't have a controller, best not even to think about playing Slain. Unfortunately even with a controller, Slain is only for super hardcore gamers, the type who not only love the Dark Souls games, but also think they are way too easy (I estimate this category to be, at most, 2% of gamers). Some say Slain is similar to Castlevania or Megaman, but those games are colossally easy compared to Slain. Slain is a million times more difficult than they are. If you buy Slain expecting a difficulty level on par with Megaman or Castlevania, then you will be in for a rude awakening. In Slain, the player is unable to save their game whenever they want. Instead, it uses a checkpoint system that only saves your game when you reach the next checkpoint. If you die before reaching the next checkpoint, then you must start over from ground zero of the last checkpoint that you did reach. These checkpoints are spaced way too far apart, to a ludicrously unreasonable extreme! If you fall in the lava once, you die. If a crushing trap touches you once, you die. If you lose all your health - which is very easy to do because Slain has no armor system and you go down in a few hits - you die. In one sequence, you have to kill two waves in a row of many skeletons who mob you from all sides and give you almost no time or space to react, and then a Skeleton Giant and his hellhound, each of which is a distinct miniboss, and both of which spawn simultaneously. For such a sequence to be realistically beatable for the average player, a checkpoint would be needed before the spawn of double minibosses. But there is none. That example is typical of the whole game. Unless you are among the hardest of the hardcore, you won't enjoy Slain.

This game is so clever in using established tropes, monsters and places from the metroidvania genre to deliver something refreshing. However, this comes with quite frustrating controls. Jumping does not work very fine, sometimes it does not work at all. This is a problem for the ubiquitous platform part of the game. Moreover, baseball skills will be essential in order to overcome some bosses....the sword is quite frankly an excellent bat more than an edged weapon. This was quite a surprise and pissed me off in some fights, since the swing of the sword is very heavy and has to be timed carefully... In short, really nice game. But play it only if you have the patience to overcome its evident flaws.

Good game. Tough, you'll die a lot. Slain! is a fitting title. Interesting enough story, has a heavy metal theme, smooth game play. My only gripe is the blocking seems inconsistent on timing at times, but that's probably more me than the game. Or maybe I'm just blaming the game for my failures? I keep coming back to this title though, so perhaps I am a sucker for punishment.