Difficulty without Depth
Download Size: 9 MB
Time Played: 4 hours
Monsters Killed: 447
Number of Deaths: 15
Wins: 0
What I'd Pay: $5
Steam Price (4/8/12): $7
This is possibly the simplest Rogue-like game I've played, yet it still feels as difficult (if not more so) than the likes of Nethack and Dungeons of Dredmor. Unfortunately, this doesn't feel like "dying because you were stupid", but more like "dying because the Random Number Generator hates you". That, plus the lack of consumables, skills, or spare equipment, dropped my enjoyment of Hack, Slash, Loot from "decent" to "meh".
The title screen, which lets you choose your character & adventure, shows some promise. "Multiple adventures in a Rogue-like game? Oo, I could be playing this for a while." Then you start the game proper and realize just how simplified it is. The only inventory you have is equipped items & a backup weapon; there's no potions, scrolls, wands, consumables, etc. Instead, any potions or scrolls you pick up take effect immediately; there's no cap on your health, so saving health potions doesn't matter, and there's no items you can keep to get out of a pinch.
This simplicity extends to interactions between objects as well: clicking on creatures attacks them, clicking on objects loots them (or desecrates them, or prays to a god...). In short, each object only has one interaction you can do with it, with very little reason not to interact with it because nearly all of them are positive. (The only interaction that was entirely negative was desecrating a coffin & having a skeleton appear & kill me.) The biggest decisions you make in this game are which equipment to pick up and which order to defeat enemies in, both of which are usually simple as well.
The hardest part of this game was simply surviving whatever the game threw at you for the first floor; if I could get through that alright, I usually got enough decent equipment and health to survive nearly to the end of the adventure. (Unfortunately, I never managed to actually beat an adventure; such is the nature of Rogue-likes.) I would open a door on the first level and see a situation where my only chance was to stand there, attack, and pray the dice gods smiled on me. (The enemies chase you forever & move as fast as you do, so escaping them isn't an option.) With the damage some enemies did, you needed them smiling upon you; the first level often had monsters that only had a 20% chance of hitting you, but took out 50-80% of your initial health on a hit. Even the initial room occasionally screwed you over; in one game, I started out with 2 kobolds adjacent to my squishy wizard. I think he survived about 7 turns before croaking. At least in the later levels, I died more from stupidity than from random chance, but getting there was a problem; out of 15 games total, I had 2 characters survive that first level.
The fickleness of the Random Number Generator, plus the lack of meaningful choices in the game, ultimately makes Hack, Slash, Loot a subpar time waster. I would only recommend checking it out if you've already played Dungeons of Dredmor (which is cheaper & better than this game) and have either gotten bored with it or are looking for a similar game that takes less time to complete.
Note: It sounds like the more attempts you make, the more PCs you unlock, including some that are more powerful than the initial characters. I'm mad that A)the characters best suited for novice players are locked until later in the game and B)there was no info about these unlocks in the manual or the game.
