I’ve just suffered through over ten hours of ‘Slain!’. What at first seemed like the coolest and ‘metalist’ platformer I’ve seen in recent years, lost its appeal after a mere twenty minutes. Nine and a half hours on top of this left me banging my head against the nearest wall, pleading for some almighty being to remove ‘Slain!’ from my Steam library.
In ‘Slain!’, you play as the recently revived ‘Bathoryn’ in a Gothic-inspired world that randomly switches between using the olde-English vernacular to extremely out of place “text-speech”. To beat ‘Slain!’, you have to fight through three areas to reach and ‘defeat’ the seven deadly, and broken, Overlords. To get to these bosses you’ll have to defeat hordes of boring generic skeletons, bat-things, shite dogs and even bigger skeletons.
To be honest, whilst playing through ‘Slain!’ for what Steam tells me was ten hours, I had no clue how far I was progressing as the game transports you between outside, inside and castle locations, at one point I even turned into a wolf! Why? I dunno, but I was chased by the head of an even bigger wolf so that was . . . cool?
Cool is the only characteristic I can apply to ‘Slain!’. If you grew up with the likes of ‘Doom’, ‘Splatterhouse’ and other gory, over-the-top games of that ilk, ‘Slain!’ does an amazing job of creating its gory setting. The sprite work is incredible and backgrounds are nice and crisp, attempting to draw you into its retro-inspired world. While so much work has gone into beautifully drawing these assets, it’s a shame to see everything else fall apart.
Combat, one of the pillars of an action platformer, feels flat and dull. Attacks don’t feel as if they hit most of the time, sometimes they just don’t anyways, fighting foes just feels repetitive since it consists of pressing the attack button and occasionally dashing backwards. The dullness in the game’s combat could also be a result of the games tinny, generic and just plain sound effects which lack any real impact.
Animations, excluding environmental traps and the protagonist, have an awkward janky look to them. Enemies, who can get trapped easily (more on that later), show off the lack of flow between their animations as they flicker from static to attacking in less than a single frame. The walking animations between certain enemies, especially the skeletons, lack frames which, when playing at a higher frame-rate, is extremely noticeable.
Hit-detection in ‘Slain!’ is also fairly broken. Due to certain areas being scripted in the appearance of their enemies, positioning yourself near their spawn is obviously the normal strategy. Placing yourself slightly too close to enemies will cause every single attack you throw at them to pass through them as if they aren’t even there. Environmental traps also suffer from poor hit-detection feeling as though your character gets magnetically dragged to them if you stand too close. This shoddy hit-detection can also work in your favour as most of the enemies, especially bosses, are easily dispatched by crouching and wailing on the attack button.
But these aren’t the only broken aspects of ‘Slain!’. Glitches are frequent. Checkpoints sometimes just don’t work, which in the first level resulted me having to play through the entire level three times, the ending ‘cutscene’ bugged out into a soft-lock state and I found myself respawning into the environment multiple times. These are just some instances of the incessant brokenness that seeps into almost every aspect of ‘Slain!’. Apart from the decent metal soundtrack, by Curt Victor Bryrant of Celtic Frost, ‘Slain!’ becomes a generic, linear, broken experience that results in frustration, anger and ten whole hours of extreme boredom.
I would’ve gotten over the repetitive gameplay had the title not been this broken. Unfortunately, in its current state I’m sorry to say that it’s just unplayable. This game needs to be fixed and I don’t know how long it’ll take the developers to do that.
Summary
While initially ‘Slain!’ seems like it should be a great product with its gorgeous pixel-art, it only takes a small time for everything to fall apart thanks to countless bugs, repetition and God-awful combat. ‘Slain!’ needs to be improved in almost every aspect before I can even think of recommending it to anyone, metal-fan or not.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.