Pitched as a cute, approachable “Souls-lite,” Slime Heroes combines two of my favorite things in video games: adorable slimes and Dark Souls-style gameplay. Despite some good ideas, Slime Heroes’ recipe doesn’t quite work. Yes, it’s cute, but it also feels frustrating, clumsy, and unfinished.
Slime Heroes casts the player as a colorful, customizable blob who fights way above its weight class in an attempt to save a fantasy world from a spreading corruption. Played from a top-down isometric perspective, my slime has a variety of attacks at its disposal: a light attack, a heavy attack, and a jumping smash attack that adorably transforms my slime into a smashing fist or an anvil. I quickly earned spell-like skills that let me throw projectiles or summon a whirlwind that sucks in my enemies.
My slime can also find equippable weapons, like swords and spears, out in the world. (These weapons are also composed of slime.) And like any good video game protagonist, my slime can wear hats (and other accessories) that grant it super speed, health regeneration, or extra vitality.
Being a “Souls-lite,” Slime Heroes adopts various concepts from games like Dark Souls. In addition to light and heavy attacks for all weapons, my slime can dodge to avoid taking damage, a move that’s limited by a stamina meter of sorts. When my slime perishes — the remaining ooze spells out things like “ouch,” which is cute — it respawns at the last safe point I visited, Slime Heroes’ bonfire equivalent. And upon death, the shards I’ve collected from enemies I’ve defeated wait for me at the location of my defeat. These souls… er, shards can be spent on various slime upgrades.
Slime Heroes builds on solid concepts established by more than a decade of Souls games, but developer Pancake Games comes up short on adapting them in a cute, kid-friendly setting. Combat feels mushy and too simplistic to remain engaging. After battling a handful of the same dull enemy types again and again, I opted to simply scoot by many of them, bypassing combat when I could. Platforming has a similarly spongy feeling; it just doesn’t feel great to move through this world.
There is one very good idea at the heart of Slime Heroes, though. As I progressed through its fantasy world, I unlocked skills that could be combined in clever ways. A skill like Whirlwind, which creates a vacuum-like tornado, can be combined with a skill like Projectile, so that my slime shoots a moving whirlwind. Or I can combine that Whirlwind with a Breath attack, causing the tornado that I summon to spit out columns of Breath attacks. What’s more, I can combine special effects with each skill, allowing me to add life-steal effects, fire, ice, and other modifiers for a massive number of unique combinations.
You can even summon familiars that fight on your behalf and modify them to fire meteors, resulting in screen-filling magical effects. Experimenting with these combinations can be fun, and I’d love to see other games built on Slime Heroes’ skill effects.
Unfortunately, the user interface for Slime Heroes makes swapping skills, their primary and secondary effects, and their bonus special effects into something of a chore. Much of the UI is clunky, just part of an overall lack of polish on the game that’s incredibly disappointing.
It’s hard to recommend Slime Heroes to anyone looking for their next Soulslike fix. Kids might like it for its cute, well-animated characters, though I can see it being overly frustrating for an unskilled player; Slime Heroes doesn’t do a good enough job with guiding players on what to do next or where to go. But it is kid- and new player-friendly in other ways, thanks to two-player couch and online co-op (a feature I didn’t get to test), and accessibility options that lower enemy damage and boost damage dealt by the heroic slime of its story. Slime Heroes can be really, really easy if you tune it right.
That’s not enough to make Slime Heroes rise above its shortcomings. There’s good intention here, and some very cute visuals, but it’s missing what makes other Souls games great: finely tuned game mechanics.
Slime Heroes was released March 6 on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. (Slime Heroes will be available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 at a later date.) The game was reviewed on Xbox using a code provided by Whitethorn Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/impressions/536378/slime-heroes-impressions-xbox-pc
