Branded as an "approachable Souls-lite", the improbably cute Slime Heroes is exactly that-a cute, slimey spin on the Soulslike genre inspired by FromSoftware’s classics Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. A sort of RPG-not-so-lite element means that you can have a standard and heavy melee attack, with additional magic attack skills. In addition, tertiary skills can add additional elemental skills (fire, ice, lightning, etc.) and enemy debuffs to each attack.
There are regular puzzle challenge dungeons and if you defeat bosses new weapons and powerful skills can be added to your ultimate skill slot. Extra hearts can be added to your health bar and shards collected from defeated enemies can be spent on a host of upgrades.
Visits to NPCs that look like weird monkeys allow you to health up, level up and even fast-travel to previously visited NPCs. The only problem is that visiting these guys makes all the enemies respawn, in true "Soulslike"style. Other 'Scholar' NPCs (that look like mushroom-headed parrots) offer hints at what you should do next, and reward you when you deliver tomes recovered from challenging dungeons to them.
Sadly, we had several attempts at playing the game's co-op mode but could never get it to work. We had other issues with sometimes falling to an inglorious death because foreground scenery obscured our view, and entrances to new areas that don't open, with no explanation as to why or how to open them, despite totally clearing the area of enemies and exploring every inch of the map. By the time we'd explored all of the map that we could access, our cute little Slime was SO overpowered that a single swipe dispatched most enemies, and even what were initially fearsome larger creatures became easy fodder.
I’m not sure why the 'X' button is most frequently used to advance/select things in Slime Heroes–I mean, who does that…? And then for some reason ‘A’ gets used to pick an item. We've had some terrible UIs (user interfaces) and maps in games in the past (I'm thinking of YOU, The Gunk), but Slime Heroes’ map is right down there with it. It doesn't fill in everywhere you've been, has vague edges that could be routes forward but probably aren't, and is practically useless other than to show you where the fast-travel NPCs are.
So, while we'd hoped for a fun, cartoony hack, slash & magic co-op adventure all we got was an initially fun but ultimately disappointing 7-hour solo plod around a map full of easy to kill, respawning enemies, which in time just became a chore.
Many thanks to Whitethorn Games for the review code.