Recent reviews by Orion

Too much RNG

They fixed it!

Best Map game on the market, don't buy the hype around their older titles though, I'd say they're all worse than this one.

Pipe Bomb Go Boom

One of the best RPGs of 2009, and despite being pretty old now it still holds up in the ways that matter most. Play it on Hard or Nightmare if you want a game where your decisions matter, playing on Normal is pretty easy for the most part. Easy mode is for when you want to zone out and just enjoy the story.

Best Fighting Game on the market atm tbh, probably the best one to be released for a long time.

Tl;DR: Heart and Slash is an unfinished roguelike with ambiguously ambitious goals that it fails to meet, alongside generally having clumsy execution in most avenues. I don't think most people will get much value from it.

Heart and Slash looked really promising to me when I checked it out on the steam page a year or so ago and it'd been on my wishlist for a while before I eventually picked it up this last winter.

Unfortunately I was let down in almost every way. The attack animations of every weapon tend to feel incredibly stiff and paradoxically easy to whiff due to the game's lack of lock on or strafe functionality. Running, in contrast, feels really fluid and fast, allowing for a ton of easy backtracking (something you'll be doing a lot of due to randomized room layouts), making the game overall feel clunky and unballanced. When half your movements work one way and the rest move another way, it's hard to develop a good feeling gameplay flow.

There aren't very many levels or bosses at all, but the ones that are here are fairly poorly fleshed out and don't live up to the hype of Randomized room layouts (a feature I'm not entirely sure would've benefited the title from the get go).
Most enemies are entirely incapable of attacking you (on their own) in many contexts, but in later levels they're capable of swarming you, which never feels good to lose to when paired with stiff and awkward attack animations.

What little writing there is feels very amateur, a common trait of many kickstarter projects I've had bad experiences with in the past (Children of Zodiarcs / Nelo come to mind), further cutting into my impression of the game. It's hard to take your characters or setting seriously when even you're incapable of doing so without shoehorning in bizarre dev references masquerading as "quirky item descriptions" or plodding back and forth dialogue defined by reddit-tier robot jokes.

Lastly, my biggest gripe is that every runthrough of the game lasting till level 4, the level I presume to be the final level given lack of information about the game online and it being the level hinted as being a big deal in-game, takes around half an hour. Every Single Run takes AT LEAST THIRTY MINUTES if you're not a speedrunner, often times yeilding nothing other than EXP for your next run (at best). That left me with a sense of wasted time.

Heart and Slash isn't fun, and is infatuated with it's own gimmick to the detriment of it's overall quality.

That being said, I hope the developers do their best to move past these failings on their next project, as I do see a lot of potential in their work. All Art assets in the game are pretty well polished and visually appealing, and though attack animations have their issues, at the very least it's easy to understand where the developers were coming from. I can appreciate a dark souls reference or two.

Good luck AHFOG.

Khimera is charming from beginning to end and though I've almost 100%'d it in a little over 10 hours, the experience will stick with me. It's a great time, well worth anyone's attention.