Ambition of the Slimes

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Ambition of the Slimes is a Tactics-Style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG originally released on the iOS and PlayStation Vita in 2015, making its way to 3DS in 2016 and then to PC and Nintendo Switch in 2018. This is a game that has you controlling a horde of body snatching slimes as they seek to take over a medieval fantasy kingdom.

For its presentation, this game affects an 8-bit pixel art aesthetic, but its backgrounds are simple polygonal 3D, allowing for players to rotate their view of the field in a way simple 2D visuals wouldn’t be able to. This is combined with a chiptune soundtrack that’s paradoxically both catchy and somewhat grating, and a story that’s poorly localized and basically amounts to humans acting dismissive, shocked, and repulsed at the slimes a lot. The end result is a game that evokes an extremely old-school look and feel, even if it is technically a bit more modern than that.

For the gameplay, I feel like Ambition of the Slimes is something of a one-trick pony… but I have to admit, it’s a clever trick. The slimes you control are, on their own, generally helpless. As is tradition in a medieval fantasy setting, a slime is generally easy fodder for even the most amateur of would-be heroes. However, in this game, slimes all have a way to turn the tables – the aforementioned body-snatching.

When a slime sidles up next to an unwitting human target, they can choose to “claim” that human, which causes the human to look straight up, open their gullet, and allow the slime to leap into their mouth and slide down their throat with delightfully disgusting gulping noises. After this, players control that human until the level is completed, using the human’s skills and stats as if they were your own.

This makes for a really amusing visual when you first see it, but beyond that it makes for an interesting central mechanic, and the game builds on this with its gameplay, with each of the game’s levels acting as a puzzle of sorts – which slimes will be most effective for capturing the best humans? Which humans should you capture? How can you best go about capturing them without getting picked off while you’re still just a vulnerable slime? Should you try to capture the tougher armored enemies (whose shielded mouths make it less likely a “claim” will work on them) or decide it’s less risky to control the humans around them and beat them to death? It’s this kind of decision-making that forms the center of the strategy of this game.

The downside of that is that a lot of the traditional gameplay loop for Strategy-RPG games gets lost in the shuffle here. You’re not really grinding up your party to become powerhouses – at best, you’ll level them up so they can tank a hit or two without dying, but if everything goes as planned, you’ll ideally spend most of your time simply using the stats of the enemies you take over. Likewise, building the ideal party doesn’t mean the same thing here – you gather together different types of slimes, sure, but their individual stats don’t mean much for battle, so much as giving them different options for mobility, a better ability to claim humans, and different elemental types for the game’s rock-paper-scissors elemental system.

Also, you won’t be making traditional battle strategies, as there aren’t many options for each character – only a very limited number of attacks for each character. Instead, you’ll mostly be focused on positioning, trying to swarm enemies to take them down without taking a hit, or claiming “flags” on the map that heal characters who stand on them like calling “base!”. Because of this, while Ambition of the Slimes feels pretty original, it also seems to lack some of the depth you typically find in games in this genre.

At the very least, I should note that this game does something that far too few games in this genre seem to do on the Nintendo Switch – it makes some pretty good use of touchscreen controls. The game is also perfectly playable with a traditional gamepad as well, but having the option is nice.

In the end, while I didn’t love Ambition of the Slimes, I appreciate that it’s doing something fairly different and unique with the Strategy-RPG genre. And for a mere $5, fans of the genre may find it worth checking out simply for that reason. It doesn’t have a lot of the typical gameplay loop that this genre usually draws on, and what it has in its place is lacking some depth, but it’s still appealing enough in its own quirky way that you may find it worth a look.

tl;dr – Ambition of the Slimes is a Tactics-style Turn-Based Strategy-RPG that has players using slimes to take control of humans to fight other humans. This is a unique twist on the gameplay of the genre, and a twist that makes this play almost more like a Puzzle game than a Strategy-RPG. Of course, this means it lacks some of what makes Strategy-RPGs so fun, and it doesn’t have the same depth of other games in its genre, but for $5 its unique charm may still make it worthwhile for genre fans to try.

Grade: C+

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