Slain was the first game I ever reviewed for ICXM.net. As my introduction to the professional games journalism field, Slain was a repetitive, torturous slog that I put ten full hours of my life into. On launch, Slain was a complete mess. While its art fantastic art direction did at least give me some pretty visuals to gawk at, broken hitboxes, achievements, hit-detection, spawning and checkpoints combined with the fact that you could get through the majority of the game by just crouching and spamming the attack button made my first foray into professional reviews an ironic hell of a time.
After the monstrosity that arrived, however, developer Wolf Brew Games has come back with a rebranding of the game—now entitled Slain: Back from Hell—and claims to have improved every aspect of the action-platformer. Combat, controls, visuals, saving, camera, enemy AI and pretty much every aspect of Slain has been improved in one way or another in order to make it less of a chore to play through and actually turn the game into a pretty enjoyable romp through some of the most horrendous locations you would ever see in your life.
Slain: Back From Hell is probably one of the most fitting titles a game reinvigoration can ever be given. If you had the displeasure of finding out Slain was one of the most boring and broken games you could play on Steam that wasn’t a shovelware asset flip. Basic combat was one of the most mundane features of Slain’s original release. Once you figured out how to trick the game, combat just consisted of ducking and mashing the attack button since enemies couldn’t hit you. Slain: Back from Hell not only fixes the enemy AI and hitboxes in order to counter this problem but also makes the combat systems more robust. This time, the four different elemental weapons you’ll unlock as you progress feel as if they actually make a considerable amount of difference on specific enemies. Magic blasts feel buffed, this time being able to take down a standard grunt and blocking—whilst not successfully negating all damage unless you hit the block at just the right time—is actually an action you have to learn instead of just holding down the button.
A simple but effective addition to the game is that of parrying. As I mentioned before, blocking only negates all damage when the block is timed directly before the enemies attack hits. Blocking then slows down times and allows you to hit back with a huge counter-attack which, if the enemy is killed because of it, can refill your magic meter allowing you to keep on fighting.
Sadly, the hit-detection and hit boxes still aren’t one-hundred-percent fixed and still prove to be frustrating from time to time. While the original game featured shoddy hit detection on single enemies, this time, it only seems to happen on either big enemies—such as bosses—or when enemies are walking over each other and switching positions. This will result in only one of the two overlapping enemies being hit leading to you getting hit by the other.
This is frustrating because of how scarce health is in Slain. Each attack from an enemy takes a considerable chunk of your health bar and checkpoints are still fairly far apart from one another to justify the difficulty spikes that Slain throws at you. Where most platformers try to balance between difficult enemies and instadeath traps, Slain decides it’s better to throw both obstacles at you in order to ramp up the difficulty.
While many people will jokingly refer to difficult games as the “Dark Souls of” whatever they please just because you die a lot, there is a massive difference between being killed for the sake of it and being killed for a reason. Dark Souls teaches you with every death and items you pick up are kept when you respawn. Slain doesn’t do this, even with collectibles, making repeated deaths incredibly frustrating as you are forced through the same extended corridor over and over again because the game can’t quite decide which enemy it wants you to hit.
Summary
This version of Slain is undoubtedly better than its predecessor, though. The graphics and audio still hold up really well and the fantastic style is still a sight to behold even after playing hours of the game. Many of the problems are fixed: the game actually unlocks achievements, checkpoints work this time around and the majority of issues with the combat are fixed but when you play Slain: Back From Hell it is still a mediocre platformer disguised in a shell of awesome art. The difficulty and enemy encounters need to be reworked.
Additional Information
Recently we got our hands on the Xbox One version and I have to say that a number of problems that plagued the PC release have been rectified. I’m not sure what it is but it looks like Slain: Back from Hell isn’t meant to be played with a mouse and keyboard. Hopping onto the Xbox One controller dramatically changes the experience. Blocking was an absolute chore before but on Xbox One it works amazingly well. You don’t end up dying every few minutes and if you’re careful and block accordingly, you might not even die at all in the level. Just as a comparison I went back to the PC version and I found it to still have many control issues. Maybe the developers optimized the Xbox One release to a greater degree but everything just comes together here. Usually we’re the ones giving the Xbox One version a lower score but in this case I think the Xbox One version will have to get the higher score. I’m not sure why this optimization, especially when it comes to the controls, hasn’t made its way to PC.
Apart from that, hit boxes and hit-detection seem to have been fixed in this version as well. I’m not sure how because they still seem to be a little off on PC. The most notable encounter that demonstrates the discrepancy happens towards the beginning of the game when you encounter your first giant demon. On PC it’s impossible to kill him because it seems like you’re always missing. However, on Xbox One it’s easy for some odd reason. Maybe the difficult has been further adjusted?
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns on Xbox One though. The checkpoint system is still a little off and they need to be closer together. In some levels the game becomes incredibly difficult and it’s a chore to play half the level again just to get to the same part. This really needs to be fixed. Apart from that, the game has definitely seen a substantial improvement when making the jump to Xbox One. I’m surprised to be honest and this is a version I can definitely recommend.
Asher and Lewis is a shared byline ICXM used for 4 articles co-authored in 2016 covering game reviews, and Xbox news. See the individual contributor profiles for the writers behind these collaborations.