L.G.C. |Reviews| — Slain: Back from Hell

Your intrepid heroes nope a screen, rebind controls, and noodle a soundtrack. Slain: Back from Hell faces the CHAIRQUISITON!

Game: Slain: Back From Hell
Webzone: store.steampowered.com/app/369070/
Devel: Wolfbrew Games
Engine: Unity
Price: 12.99 / CDN 13.99

Wazzat: A heavy metal inspired arcade combat with puzzle elements and gore galore. Stunning visuals and true old school gameplay accompanied by the most metal soundtrack you’ve ever heard.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Unity scream of nope even in Big Picture mode, impressive.

J-

P-

Unity Screen of Nope: -1 Chair.
If it weren’t for the lack of resolution options in game, it’d be useless too!

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Why has FSM cursed us with two weeks of hipster-pixel bullsh*t!

J-

Well, they got a former celtic frost guitarist to noodle for the soundtrack, so there’s your metal cred
And noodle he does!
Beyond that, you have a hipster pixel pseudo black metal visual aesthetic, which honestly looks like a gored up version of simon’s quest
Complete with annoying flying medusa heads!

P-

This is not the most metal soundtrack I’ve ever heard.
In fact this, to quote what I previously said about SEUM, it’s Elevator Music of the Metal Kind or EMMK.
The game which had the most Metal soundtrack ever, and even had freakin Ozzy playing the devil, was Brütal Legend.
So no, you don’t get to claim that!
I wouldn’t go so far as describing the visuals as Stunning either!
They look Castlevania on the Mega Drive/Genesis good, but stunning the visuals are not.
Speaking of Mega Drive, this game really does give me the Altered Beast vibe in more than just aesthetics but more on that later!

Total-

Control

V-

You really should not have anything remotely resembling precision platforming unless your controls are hella tight.
It’s like the system can only handle one input at a time.
However, you can rebind the controls in-game.
Then again rebinding movement to the D-pad turned it into a suggestion stick.

J-

There’s this super annoying half second delay between pressing a button and doing the thing
Makes it really hard to react to shit
Speaking of which, enemy hitboxes are weird

P-

Decided to start the game on the Steambox; Unity screen of nope!
I had to go into the Overlay, edit the controller mapping to make the left Areola on the Mistress to work as the mouse and clicking it would send the left click.
Like the captain of the Titanic said when he realised he couldn’t steer the boat in time: “The controls are floaty as fuck!”
They seem to have made the attack moves purposefully limited.
- After every 3rd swing you have a little pause.
And that’s fine, if your controls are tight. In that case it would a limitation which the player would need to master to ensure survival.
Plenty of games have done this. Hyper light drifter, comes to mind.
Even though in Hyper Light Drifter you had a visible 33ms delay from you hit a button to when your character did the thing, it felt tight and given enough practice you would learn to work with that delay.
In Slain though, the delay comes not from a 30FerPS lock, but from that stupidly over designed animation.
When you hit a button, you expect that press to trigger the action not the animation.
I can’t give it 1 chair for controls, since you could still in theory play and finish the game…

Total-

FUN

V-

Did you set out to make a rage platformer?
Because those only work when you FK you, not when a busted input system causes you to get fkd.

J-

Pretty much everything I can say about this game boils down to: I want to like it, but the controls are garbage
When you’re making a platformer/action game, this is the one aspect you absolutely have to nail
And you didn’t brad. No amount of heavy metal noodling is going to save it
And I really did want to like the game.

P-

Slain, like many Nostalgia driven games before, wears its inspirations on its sleeve.
It’s a 16bit-style, 2D platformer which is more than a little reminiscent of Altered Beast and Castlevania on the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unlike Castlevania though, you have one path when on a level proper.
Though, it has a hub town which reminds me of Taimumari and -1 chair for reminding me of that game.
The floaty controls make combat and precision platforming a crapshoot.
You want to play a game which does both of those properly and is still a 2D platformer, play Salt and Sanctuary instead.
- Salt and Sanctuary also has the advantage of not being a hipster pixel game.
But, as much as I wish we were throwing chairs at it, we’re talking about Slain.
Slain fills me with disdain.
It’s everything I hate and grown tired of over the past few years.
It’s the perfect representation of a Kickstarter project.
It pulls the nostalgia-ridden retrogrades in with it’s promise of 2D pixel platformer and hopes the Metal theme will disguise the shitty, overdone mechanics and terrible controls.
Well it doesn’t.
Like AM2R, it’s a game which does dick and all to advance videogames as medium. And serves only to perpetuate the Nostalgia culture.
At least AM2R had tight controls.