Heart & Slash Review

"Heart Slashing"

Campaign/Gameplay

Heart & Slash is a rogue-like dungeon crawler of sorts featuring procedurally generated environments so that the experience is never the same when you play. That's good as the game is relatively difficult requiring you to often replay the same areas until a checkpoint. It's however one of the better ones in that unlocks can carry forth with you onto the next life in order to make things a bit easier each time. This is done with the collection of bolts acquired from those you've scrapped and can be put into what upgrades you'd like. When playing your health is represented with hearts which makes sense and these don't replenish unless you come across rare health packs scattered in the world. One of the bigger issues I did have with this title that wasn't the difficulty is the camera which feels quite old in that it's constantly flopping all over the place which is very nauseating. The game will give you objectives while moving through and talking with a computer is what first gives you direction. The music of the game is also well done mixing into the world well and the graphics were also quite stylized which was nice. Within the randomly created world you'll take on waves on enemy machines while also searching for better gear as there's a wide selection of weapons available to find. This leads into combat which takes a simple approach with a couple button focus, but that makes sense as you need to be constantly focusing the camera direction.

The Conclusion

Heart & Slash is a decent challenge for those looking at something a bit different in their dungeon crawling schedule. I will mention that the camera can make you feel a tad bit sick which is a strange feeling for me when gaming. The world works fine being filled with unique enemies, it's just drawn back due to difficulty and a camera you're constantly fighting. It was nice to see the world being random for each entry, it was just annoying to replay for progression as so many titles seem to be taking that approach recently. It's definitely a title for the more hardcore player out there and not something for everyone to play.

Heart & Slash Review on Xbox One
Review Code Provided by Novy PR

Rating Overall: 6.5