by Omar (@siegarettes)

• Heart & Slash 
  
• Developer- AHEARTFULOFGAMES
  
• Publisher- Badland Games
  
• PC (Steam), PS4, Xbox One
  

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a soft spot for robots. Well, okay, more like a liquefied gooey center that spills out whenever I get the chance to talk about them. If the design of Heart & Slash is any indication, developer AHEARTFULOFGAMES does as well. There’s an art direction that evokes the Mega Man Legends series, clear nods to other famous robots, and a return to themes of artificial beings finding a sense of humanity that’s been popular since Pinocchio came around. The story itself centers on Heart, the titular protagonist, struggling in a post-human world against QuAsSys, a quality assurance system moving to create a world of perfect equality—by removing the unique individuals it sees as defects. Naturally, that puts Heart, with their Apple II inspired chassis and singular design, in opposition with QuAsSys, which of course means a lot of robot brawling.

Unsurprisingly, this takes place as a hack and slash through a series of corridors and rooms from within the facility you were made. Heart & Slash also borrows the ever popular rogue-like elements to build on, giving you a run based game of randomized loadouts and maps to fight in. There’s some noted resemblance to Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry, particularly in how it’s built around the interplay between multiple weapons that can brought in with a pull of the trigger. Heart & Slash takes a much more deliberate approach, however, with longer breaths between beats compared to the continual rhythms of DmC. There’s also less space for immediate reaction, so you’ll have to watch your surroundings and know when you’re in a situation where you’re better off running away. Every hit means a chance to lose hard to restore HP, and the permadeath nature of the game means you’ll never be able to play a singular encounter until you’ve mastered it. You’ll also have to keep in mind the elemental weakness system, which sets up a rock, paper, scissors style flow of resistances. 

When all these elements come together, it gives Heart & Slash an improvisational feeling, working with whatever tools you’re given to scratch out a situation that’s favorable. Smart play can also have you turning enemies against each other, dodging attacks to have them collide with other robots, or turning missiles against them with a well timed attack. There’s an assortment of satisfying weapons—elemental swords, heavy hammers, baseball bats, shotguns, and rifles—and several ability endowing body parts to swap out. My favorites were being the rocket pack and head, which let you speed through hallways and fire homing missiles. Each run is also forward looking, with the parts gained from destroying enemies, which are in turn used for upgrading your current gear, carrying over to your next run when you die. There’s even a bit of narrative flavor in during encounters with Slash, your rival robot, that acknowledges your continued failure and return. 

Of course, more often than not, you’re not going to have that optimal run, and things will get a bit messy. And this is where the problems start. While there’s a system for unlocking new items that gives you some sense of forward progress even upon failure, the feeling of grind sets in quickly after a few hours. That’s especially true when your weapon is frequently mismatched to the element of your enemies, resulting in reduced damage that makes fights drawn out. Which is fine most of the time, since you can simply avoid them, but becomes tiresome when you get locked into a room with them. There’s an elements of planning to avoiding these situations, but sometimes you just get a bad hand. Some weapons have much more utility than others as well, such as the baseball bats and hammer that can stun or knock down enemies, making crowds easier to manage. Those are compromises common to the format, of course, but taken alongside the tally of upgrade parts that carries over sometimes an entire series of runs can feel like nothing but a grind for resources for the “real run” that supplies you with a loadout that feels useful. It’s hard to commit to a run when you know that it’ll be easier after two more. 

Compounding that are the end of stage boss fights, which comes at you fast, and with a damage potential far higher than any enemies preceding them. It can be upsetting to spend ten to fifteen minutes fighting through a level only to get to a boss and immediately wreck in less than a minute. This gets especially frustrating with the permadeath penalty and alternate bosses, as it gives you a very short window of time to observe a boss pattern and get to terms with it.

That reflects my larger sense of frustration with Heart & Slash. There’s so much immediate appeal to it: weighty combat, charming characters, compelling art design, and even a story that plays a bit with the format and teases out a larger world. A lot of it feels in competition with the structure of the game, however. By necessity of the genre, areas, dialogue and situations will all repeat frequently, and instead of sustaining a sense of improvisation and immediacy, it begins to draw attention to the seams and make you feel like you’re playing the same handful of challenges repeatedly to grind out a little more progress each time. There simply aren’t enough variables to make that repetition feel warranted. 

The best of the genre consistently generate stories of absurd combinations of weapons and abilities that made a run unique, or moments of interesting failure. Instead, Heart & Slash feels like a game of conflicting intentions, not quite settling on how it wants to tell its story, and relying on the compulsion of unlocking new weapons to carry it through. It’s got heart, for sure, but passion without direction only leads to heartbreak.