Inadvertently, Slain is an accurate retro gaming simulation. As best as I can recall, it correctly reproduces the feeling of being eleven years old in 1994 and taking home a boldly colored Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo side-scroller from Blockbuster Video. I wouldn’t have known what Slain was, exactly, but I knew I liked Golden Axe or Streets of Rage, and Slain, in this scenario, would appear to be a hyper-violent contemporary.
There is a dangerous crossroads between indulging in nostalgia and recognizing genuine innovation and properly designed systems. We choose to remember and still enjoy Final Fight, Golden Axe and Castlevania’s more linear origins, while X-Perts, D.D. Crew, and Bubba ‘n’ Stix are either completely forgotten or the subject of a horrendous Let’s Play on YouTube. The latter category of games is composed of copycats, assumptions that a game can get by on visual prowess alone, and a perceived lack of design prowess. Slain, as it stands four days after its release, has all of these problems.
Slain’s premise isn’t inadequate. You’re a grungy, heavy-metal looking dude, you have huge sword, and legions of undead things populate a hellish landscape. The pixel art is gorgeous and the characters, while occasionally flaunting that odd pre-rendered sheen, flow well inside the game’s space. Each of Slain’s five stages hosts a couple of original guitar-shredding metal instrumentals by Curt Victor Bryrant of Celtic Frost, ensuring Slain’s sonic identity stays consistent with its metal-as-fuck persona.
Music, thought to be its strong suit, is one of Slain’s largest problems. It’s not that the same four-minute track repeats well after it’s worn out its welcome—intentionally grating or not, this is actually consistent with Slain’s 16-bit aspirations—but rather it dominates the sound mix. Striking an enemy, making your character jump, witnessing huge jets of blood, trying to hear environmental cues to aid with platforming — it’s all buried in the mix, and I would have never noticed it if not for the brief pause in the soundtrack before a song loops around. This seems like the kind of thing that would be an easy fix and could be patched away. The more I played Slain, however, the more I became convinced the audio mix wasn’t an anomaly, but rather a warning shot before more lethal rounds were to be fired in Slain’s heart.
Combat is boring and broken. What begins with a series of single-button combos conspires to end with a perfectly timed backslash. This backslash, when is dedicated to its own button executed as a final hit on an opponent, is intended to refill a bit of your mana bar. I stopped doing this quickly because it never appeared to matter; health and magic refills are in frequent supply. It’s not long before a flaming sword and an ice axe, both of which trade speed for power in different ways, join your arsenal. You also have a back-dash move, intended to get you out of hairy situations but, in practice, is inferior to just walking backwards and feels like an afterthought. Only your ability to block, performed by crouching and remaining stationary contains any semblance of risk against reward.
Ideally, Slain is supposed to operate with a paper/rock/scissors mechanic. Witches fall easier to your flaming swords while skeletons respond to cold steel. The ice axe, I assume, was to dispense the green gas spewing poison skeletons or some of those huge Anibus things walking around, but mostly it’s a tool to break the game wide open. Kneeling down and spamming the Ice Axe’s ground attack will easily take care of fireball hurling dogs, electrically enabled liches, blood spewing hags, and even a handful of Slain’s bosses. Standard enemies, of which the only form of viable offense appears to be the classic stun-lock, can be solved by backing up a few paces (or pressing the unwieldy backslide button) and restarting your trusty sword combo. Magic can either be dispensed in one giant and debatably effective attack, or rationed by tossing out projectiles.
Fighting an enemy the first time can be tough, but, as Slain only has maybe a dozen unique foes, solving them isn’t a problem. Slain is seemingly aware of this, which is why it defaults to unloading endless hordes of them throughout each area. On some level I understand this—what is a side-scrolling action game without wasting hundreds of undead creatures?—but it gets boring after a while. Witnessing Slain shrug its shoulders and throw out a series of angry crows, skeletons, fire dogs, and witches isn’t a solution, it’s an idea spun wildly out of control. Slain’s levels aren’t short due to immense padding, and there isn’t enough nuance in the combat or variation inside enemy behavior to offer much support.
Slain’s solution for its anemic combat is an unwise dalliance into rudimentary platforming. Half of each level consists of a tower that must be ascended before closing with a boss fight. Here you’ll do things like walk to one end and hit a switch so you can walk back to the other end and hit another somewhat obscured switch. Sometimes these switches summon elevators that will take you slightly higher before repeating the process. With progress Slain will toss in instant-closing demon mouths, tiles on the ground you shouldn’t walk on, giant swinging spikey balls, rivers of lava, and disappearing platforms. These basic platforming challenges are rough equivalent of things you may come up with in uninspired Super Mario Maker levels or messy LittleBigPlanet creations. Aside from loading these areas with even more enemies, Slain doesn’t do anything interesting with its tower accents. They’re just there and another annoying thing to contend with.
If all of this sounds OK so far, I am with you. In theory, Slain is an almost average game and a not-terrible way to pass an afternoon. Remember the audio mix? A plague of bugs or poor design decisions devour Slain whole. Rather than illustrate all of these in a paragraph or five, please view these thoughts or observations culled from my notes:
- · Screen moves up too far when jumping and I can’t see the platforms below.
- · Enemies falling out of the sky for no reason, lich thing falls down sometimes (note: later I would learn all enemies start out in motion and can proceed off platforms when agro’d).
- · Severe clipping issues; am I stun-locked or stuck?
- · Demands pixel-perfect platforming inside a game not equipped to reliably deliver that sort of control.
- · No observable feedback when engaging in combat with anything. Poor hit detection as well.
- · Elevators disrupting flight paths of flying enemies, either pushing them into each other or knocking them off course.
- · “You have been Slain” screen upon death lasts way too long and kills forward momentum.
- · Getting stuck in jump animation when walking over ordinary surface.
- · Respawning checkpoints that pit me directly in the inescapable path of a nearby enemy.
- · Steam achievements are not activating.
- · Terrible writing; significant grammar mistakes and giant demons telling me, “thx.” Feels last minute.
- · Checkpoints are not save points. If I leave the game mid-level I have to start the entire level over again.
- · Is that lava or the floor?
- · Bizarre level where I turn into a wolf and engage in an elongated “escape” sequence.
- · When I beat the game the credits screen came up, but it just said “credits.” It then hard locked.
Slain’s level of polish, or lack thereof, is deeply apparent in its final boss battle. Rather than properly engage the vampire that has been antagonizing me the entire game, he turns into a dragon, kills my character, and launches my sword into outer space. The end.
This is speculative, but it feels like Slain was not finished and, as an act of desperation, set free upon the marketplace. Its delay from release last December was nothing to worry about (really), but post-launch dialogue from the developer paints a picture of a game that had to come out. You can insert your own rationale for that decision, but Slain should have, at the very least, debuted in Early Access where its slap-dash assembly and myriad of bugs would have been easier to excuse.
Slain deals in disappointment instead of elation. Rather than conjure memories of Castlevania or Golden Axe, it slides into the wasteland of a forgettable 16-bit rental. In a way, regret and anticlimax are part of the retro experience, though I doubt this is the class where Slain hoped to land.
UPDATE 03/31/16: I’ve received word on behalf of Wolf Brew Games and their publisher that Slain’s bugs and issues are being addressed. A fix is coming in the next 8-12 weeks. While this certainly would make Slain more digestible, it will not affect the score or text of this review. This review was written three days after the game was available for sale and in a state deemed acceptable by the relevant parties.
