Quick Look: Heart & Slash

Video crew QL

Top Men at work.

At first I thought this was a Japanese indie game because of the style of the game and the music. But, as it turns out, it was made in... Spain?!

A rare Jason and Drew quick look has arrived!

Great quick look you guys =)

If it doesn't come up (I'm only a few minutes in as of yet,) it's possible to lock onto your enemies, which helps the wonky camera control -- click in the right stick, by default (E: I think you might just need any "head" piece to lock-on, but I'm not 100% sure. It might be tied to one of Heart's innate upgrades instead.) I would agree with Jason's assessment that the speed of the game gets a little unwieldy with the passive speed upgrade enabled, but both it and the run (both triggers at once, by default) feel pretty necessary when you're exploring the larger second and third areas of the game.

I'm about 8 hours into H&S, about to beat it for the first time (hopefully, I reached the boss on my last run but had no health to spare.) Jason's spot on that the diversity of items is great - but I think that combined with the speed of the action, once you get used to it, is what makes it feel so good.

Thanks for QLing this, Jason and Drew! It's one of my favorite games I've Kickstarted so far (along with 20XX, which isn't quite out of Early Access yet, but plays a lot better than it did in GB's Unfinished video a few months back.) If you duders have any questions about this game, feel free to ask and I'll answer if I can!

(Bonus tip: The Training Weight levels up on its own by being used. It's pretty amazing at max level.)

Music is good but too few tracks.

With no crashing planes or nuffin'.

Jason and Drew! WOOHOOW

Ethpania

Sweet, been playing this game since it came on EA like, a year and a half ago or so. Super fun from what I played, and I haven't played in months.I can see they've made some nice additions and changes since the last time I played, so I'm gonna play this sucker right now :)

Also, so awesome to see a Jason n Drew QL.

This music reminds me of some of the upbeat Persona tracks. Good stuff.

Maaaaan... nothing turns me off more than randomly generated corridors connecting boring randomly generated rooms.
This developer clearly has a ton of talent and potential, but they've fallen for the value of the rogue-like, which in theory creates a near endless amount of content!! But in reality only creates levels that are interesting for 5 minutes.
Everything you love about character action games, the characters, the difficulty tied to progress, the crazy environments, the unlocking of abilities to be mastered and used in higher difficulties, is missing here.

Every game is better when it has interesting locations to show you, and every game which tries this random generation stuff has failed in that respect.

@cikame: I wouldn't say every game that tried it has failed as many people simply adore Spelunky and Binding of Isaac. That said I agree completely in that nothing turns me off more than randomly generated rooms connected by corridors with no variety or character. For people that love this sort of stuff because they appreciate "the run" mentality and enjoy the nearly endless hours of gameplay it presents that is awesome. For me personally there is no bigger kiss of death in terms of excitement than hearing "procedurally generated."

Looks kinda Dreamcasty. Neat.

Yeah, that's what made me interested in the first place back when I saw it on Greenlight (or Kickstarter, something like those). I never had a Dreamcast, but it reminded me of old school console hack n slashers from the N64 days etc.

All of this music is great.

It reminds me of Mega Man Legends for some reason.

Yeah, and in a weird way these rooms, combined with the music, give off the vibe of Persona dungeons (although with less character). The music combined with the spinning hearts on the start screen also remind me of persona.

I actually bought this game on XBONE a couple months ago, played it for a couple hours and sort of liked what it was doing but found it too difficult and put it down. This quick look made it look a bit easier than I remembered so I picked it up again and...I'm having a lot less trouble with it. I don't know if they tweaked the difficulty (I don't remember enemies giving health back but maybe I forgot/didn't notice) or I picked up some tips from watching Jason or what, but I got further than I had and was having a better time in general.

The music is great (though as said above too few tracks) and I really enjoy the look of the game and how it plays. I do kind of wish it was just a straightforward game with a story instead of a rogue-lite though, but I guess this way is less resource intensive to make.

There's apparently a new balancing patch live on PC and PS4 but not on Xbox yet. I might wait until that is patched in on Xbox, but I'm definitely going to play more of this.

Thanks for the quick look. It was enjoyable, and it convinced me to take another look at a game I bought and put aside, which is never a bad thing.

@humanity said:

I was feeling it until Jason said "... With rogue-like elements". Gonna be happy when that trend dies out again.

I dont like roguelikes at all, but this is easily one of my top games this year. Only the first level is endless corridors, you go to a JSRF-like city level after, and the third level is pretty different too. You also unlock more of the story on each run, and it has a couple different endings. The weapons are the real stsr here though, combat is so fun that even just grinding in the factory is something I can spend a long time doing.

This reminds of like a generic F2P korean game or something and its awesome

This music is bumpin. Also, the idle animation for the training weight is the best thing ever.

@humanity: i want more focused single player handcrafted campaigns with cinematic moments in game, something i can beat in a few hours. something i can actually complete and it's awesome enough that there's replay value just in experiencing it again. oh, what could have been, we happy few.

that said, i'm not that burned out on procedural stuff. just has to feel somewhat seamless and have enough interesting variations.

@ripelivejam: yah sadly I never liked that stuff to begin with. Give me handcrafted stuff and I'll play it. Not right away mind you, like Abzu is a great example of something that I'm excited to check out but for a greatly discounted rate. I'm all for bespoke indie experiences but the value proposition has to be proportional to the content.

I'm so proud of the robots for killing humanity off... if I know my robots, they're gonna have a blast.

This game kinda looks like JSRF. I like it.

The Music has a very Persona 4 feel...

@xeiphyer: Im getting a real Nyan Cat feel from the music

The music makes me feel like this takes place in a competitor to Persona 4's Junes, I guess that's a good thing?

"....with rogue-like elements".

*closes tab*

I would be real into this if it weren't for the "roguelike elements". :^T

This game does a great job highlighting the problem inherent to procedural generation. It's often lifeless and samey. It can work well if implemented properly, but the trade off rarely worth it imo.

@tactless: I got the same vibe from it.

Duxels?

Slashed through the Heart, and you're to blame.

I think the problem with the crop of roguelike-likes these days is they don't understand the real value of procedural generation. The value ISN'T in a nigh-endless amount of (slightly different) content; it's that you can never know what's coming next.

But for that to actually be valuable, the game has to be set up in such a way that not knowing makes a difference to how you play. In a game like this one, it matters very little because what happens in one room doesn't really bleed over into the next, except you may go in with less health. The same is true for the random dungeons in Persona. Similarly, in Diablo, the layout of the dungeon rarely affects your choice of tactics. You walk into a room, kill all the monsters, then walk into the next room.

In traditional roguelikes and Spelunky, the layout matters a great deal, for two reasons: small mistakes can be deadly (and healing is far less common than Diablo or RPGs), and there is a certain amount of tactical richness to the way systems interact.

To take an example from Spelunky, you have to be careful to avoid arrow traps, which deal 2 damage compared to your starting 4 health. You don't know exactly where they're going to be, and you might be a bit careless and run into one before you see it. But you can throw an item to trigger them or coax an enemy into triggering it an taking the hit.

In traditional roguelikes, you are generally forced to take a certain amount of calculated risk in exploring because you need to 1) find the stairs, 2) find food so you don't starve, 3) gain items and experience enough to handle later, more powerful monsters, and 4) run away sometimes because there are too many/too powerful monsters. You must explore, but behind any door may be a monster than can kill you. If you find yourself in a dangerous situation, many of the solutions involve taking risks. For example, you might run away into an unexplored room, risking being trapped between two monsters (who, unlike this game, aren't content to stop chasing you as soon as you leave the room). Or you can read a scroll that will teleport you to a random place on the level that may or may not be safer. Or you can use a wand of digging to dig the floor out from under you and fall to a random place on the next level (which might not be a safer area, and you haven't explored or cleared out any of that level). Or you can drink an unidentified potion and hope that it's a potion of healing (but it might be a potion of confusion or acid). And so on.

Compare either of those to this game, where you can fight the enemies or (sometimes) run into the next room where they can't follow. You are mobile and powerful enough that things like choke points and cover aren't really a concern, so the layouts of the rooms don't really matter, apart from that one with a pit in the middle. You have enough health that no single hit is of great import, save the last. Jason seemed to have little trouble getting a respectable set of items and experience. In this case, many of the benefits of procedural generation are wasted, and those that remain are arguably outweighed by the benefits of human-generated content.

The roguelike rests on a tripod whose legs are PCG, harsh but fair, and tactical richness. You have to take all three or it doesn't stand.

Yeah this game is pretty cool, got it when it came out of early access. The combat and items are really what you're coming here for because like Jason said the game is rough around the edges.

I don't usually get motion sick, but that made me motion sick.

This game looks Dreamcast as fuck I need it

Meh, Spelunky continues to climb its way towards the top of my Best Games list. With a good gameplay loop and the type of depth Spelunky secretly has, a roguelike can really work for me.