Monster Slayers

Genre: Turn-Based Card RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Card Game Bundle Vol. 1 along with Frost. It is also in Nerdook Bundle Vol. 1 along with Reverse Crawl and Vertical Drop Heroes HD.)

Monster Slayers is a Turn-Based Card RPG that’s set up like a Roguelike. Players choose their character and explore mazelike levels full of enemy encounters and upgrade opportunities to improve their deck, adding newer cards and upgrading old ones.

This game has some stuff going for it and some stuff going against it. To its credit, it gives players a good amount of options for moving forward. Players have 12 different character classes to choose from, and they can take rooms in the dungeons in any order they like after discovering those rooms, meaning they can strategize whether it’s better to take on the next enemy first and save a healing area for later, or tough it out through the battle first, as an example. The game also makes good use of its Roguelike elements, giving you a lot of potential upgrades that carry over into future runs. Also, battles are fast-paced and keep you moving through the game at a steady pace, which is nice…

… but it has its downside, and that is that it is very easy to breeze through combat without having a good feel for what’s actually going on. Enemy cards whiz by, and it’s not easy to get a good feel for just how the battle is going beyond a cursory look at your health and the enemy’s health. It’s also not quite as easy to see if your deck building strategy is working or not until it’s too late.

The other problem here is that the presentation feels so very generic. It’s fine, it gets the job done, but it does not leave a significant lasting impression at all. Also on my list of gripes is that menu selection doesn’t always work well, most notably on the map screen where the game seemed to want to fight me when I tried to select some areas.

So… I’ve gone all this time without mentioning the elephant in the room, so here it is… this is a game in the same genre as Slay the Spire, which I absolutely love, and which is now available on the Switch. And while it does a better job than that game in some areas (I prefer the Roguelike elements in this game, and feel like it gives players a bit more utility to decide their course of action), in other areas I feel that Slay the Spire absolutely trounces it (Spire simply has more personality, and overall gives players a better feel for what’s going on during combat).

On balance, I’d say that Monster Slayers definitely has good qualities making it worth checking out, but I definitely recommend players interested in this game to check out Slay the Spire first. Compared to that game, the lack of clarity in the way information is presented here is jarring, and the lack of personality makes it harder to feel enthusiastic about this game. It’s still good, but not as good as it could have been.

tl;dr – Monster Slayers is a game that combines a Card Battle RPG with Roguelike elements. It does a good job balancing player utility and the Roguelike elements, but unfortunately it stumbles when it comes to the way it presents information to the player, and the presentation feels pretty generic.

Grade: B-

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