On paper, Slime Heroes sounds great; in this Action Platformer, take on the role of an unlikely hero – a slime – and save the world from corruption. Unlock new weapons and magic attacks, grind XP to level up, and equip different hats to unlock perks. Pepper in a little Soulslike mechanics – like giant, difficult bosses, enemies respawning, and reclaiming currency where you die – and boom; you have a game! However, after spending a couple of hours with Slime Heroes, I don’t think the brief has been executed with enough polish or variety to keep players engaged to see it through to the end.
Slime Heroes starts with a character creation mode that gives you the chance to redesign the default blue blob of sentient jelly. There’s a selection of different eyes and mouths to choose from that have all been designed to make your slime look as cute as possible. Change the colour, give it a name, and you’re ready to start. I went for a firey orange slime with big round eyes and spiky teeth because it resembled Koromon from Digimon.
After a sad opening cutscene where your best friend (a sweet-looking dragon-cat-thing) sacrifices themselves to teleport you to safety, the game begins. Straight out of the gate, I thought the camera was too close to the protagonist. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if the camera was behind or over-the-shoulder but because it’s a slightly elevated side-on angle, it’s difficult to see where you’re going. Combined with how fast you can move, and how the environment has a claustrophobic walled-in design, you will frantically bump into enemies, fall off the edge for an untimely death, or have your point of view obscured by the world boundary.
To level up, you have to collect crystals. The best way to harvest these is to kill enemies but when you first start Slime Heroes, you will realise you can collect them by chopping down flowers and breaking stuff. My problem with this is, it’s never obvious what can be destroyed. The only way to find out is to try hitting every asset you see on screen, and after the first field of flowers, I stopped bothering. This also extends to other areas of the level design; you can jump onto objects to reach higher places but these same objects are also used to decorate the world boundary. For example, you can use pink mushrooms as steps to reach new areas. But don’t assume all pink mushrooms laid out like a stairway can be climbed because sometimes they’re just set dressing. So don’t feel stupid if you spend ages trying to hop onto a series of mushrooms, only to realise your attempt to find a secret area is futile because the only thing you’re achieving is hitting the wall. Basically, a little more care in asset placement and asset design would go a long way.
The real kicker is how the core mechanic – fighting – is underwhelming, unsatisfying, and dare I say it, unbalanced. Hitting enemies feels good and an HP bar will pop up to show you how much damage you have left to inflict, which is helpful, and you can perform a stomp attack when airborne, which is excellent for crowd-control. Besides that though, conflicts often feel clumsy and unintentional; pulling off a combo locks you in place, anchoring you to the ground until the animation plays out. During the animation, you’re not invulnerable, which means you have to take whatever hits come your way. You can jump and dodge out of the way but doing so does not evade attacks with any consistency, especially during boss fights. Most of the time, it’s better to land 2 hits and awkwardly walk around an enemy instead of dodging their attacks, which renders the dodge useless. Even jumping is unreliable during combat, with the game opting to ignore your attempts to launch an aerial attack when you desperately need one. Even levelling up didn’t feel like it made any impact. Upgrading the ‘strength’ stat didn’t make a noticeable difference; enemies still required the same number of hits to kill, leaving me questioning how much the developers expect me to grind to make a noticeable improvement. Your controller will rumble every time you attack, which is equal parts encouraging and annoying. I couldn’t find an option in the settings to adjust the intensity or to turn it off completely, but after a while, you will forget it’s even happening, so it’s not a problem until your batteries run dry because of the continuous vibrating.
I like the character design, the talented cast of voice actors, the variety of heavy attack animations, the use of comic-book onomatopoeias like ‘splat’ and ‘ouch’, and the narrative set-up. Unfortunately, the cons significantly outweigh the pros.
