Nice Slice has a quite short tagline in my native tongue: "Divertiti a tagliare tutto a pezzettini", which loosely translates as "Have fun in cutting everything into small pieces".
The only label this game has, moreover, is "indie" - and it's been two years that it's been released, so.. few reviews, few players, what are we talking about here? Something enjoyable and unknown or simply something crappy and unworthy to be played?
Let's go!
We're gonna start that with a simple fact - the whole game can be "completed" in about an hour, which isn't so promising. Doing everything in a single session, in fact, will net you all the 30 achievements the game has and you'll be over. There could be actually a lot of grinding needed for the money, but they'll be used only to unlock two pointless new "worlds" as I'll write below, and many expensive new skins for your knife that, of course, are useless too and make no impact whatsoever on the game apart from some graphic difference.
Though, the Steam store page features a huge description below the screenshots and such, all translated into an uncomprehensible Italian. It tells us that the game consists in cutting everything into small pieces, choosing different knives, unlocking new items and combos, admiring the physics of the whole game and.. an awesome phrase that ends everything like this:
"diventa uno specialista del taglio vincente (see comment above) nelle più disparate condizioni di gioco" (sic.)
Well, I applied only once to translate for free everything English-Italian here and they rejected me, so.. I've never seen such a phrase anyways here, it basically says something that makes no sense ("become a winning-cut specialist (?)") followed by a literal "see comment above" written in English.
No, not that promising at all, but at least one could tell that they have put some effort into "writing" a translation..
Anyways.
Made with Unity, the game opens clearly as a simple mobile port - the buttons are huge, and everything is obviously supposed to be played on a smartphone.
No text is present - clicking on the star icon will open up 30 different achievements to reach (for instance, hitting the mouse 5 times or cutting an object in half 15 times and so on), while clicking on the play icon will open up a very simplified tutorial (a knife slicing bread) and we'll go into the game proper.
There will be a blue bar on the upper side of the screen that depletes, and there will be a huge knife running from left to right - you'll control that.
The lower part of the screen will include some small animals, tables, bread, crates and many other things to cut.
As I said, no tutorial is given so you'll have to figure out by yourself why the above-described blue bar depletes. It will go down slowly with time, and it will go down fastly if you cut through tables or items other than bread. Hitting the bread, of course, will make you replenish the bar and go forward.
Basically, your goal will be to cut the bread in smaller and smaller pieces, and remove it completely from the screen. It will be replaced by other bread, cakes or other kinds of food and you'll have to keep on clicking, allowing the knife to cut down the screen.
You will earn some star money through the levels that will allow you both to restart the level without losing your progress or, more easily, to unlock various different (and expensive) skins for your knife.
2500 and 5000 star money will respectively change your location - from the base farm house, you'll be able to play the same game on a pirate ship or on a spaceship.
What's the negative thing of all this, apart from the 2€ price which is obviously unacceptable for a free mobile phone game?
Basically, that you'll be playing over and over and over the same level. You'll cut down a slice of bread on a crate, then on that same crate will appear a cake, then other bread and so on, with here and there some star money to collect in order to unlock useless new skins or the two different "worlds" I mentioned above.
The whole game is based on clicking and instantly cutting what's below you, and it never gets that hard by the way. Yeah, it can become challenging when you'll have to cut through round cheese or small fruits instead of the usual big bread, and the physics aren't that bad - everything will basically fall down the crate and disappear or just swing here and there, so you'll have to time carefully your cuts - but the whole game looks just like a casual time-waster that could be played for free on smartphones, without having to pay for it and without having to use the mouse, which is quite pointless since the only thing you can do is tap - ehm, click the left mouse button - in order to cut right down of your knife.
You'll never be able to move it, so it can be easily controlled with a single key.
So, the whole game could be nice if free and played on a smartphone, but at 2€/$ on a PC is definitely boring. It's not annoying or frustrating, it's just boring since there are no levels - just different kinds of bread or food to slice, and money to slowly collect (and by the way, achievements aren't money-related - that's why you can finish it within an hour or little more).
My review, so, isn't totally negative. This isn't a shovelware, as I hope to have explained in my review. The game's casual, it's something that can just might let you pass 10 minutes of relax, but it's a game (an app, I should say..) that I'd never recommend to anyone due to the fact that its price - 2€/$ - is huge for the small content that it offers.
You can have some fun with this game if you have it in your hands on the phone, you'll slice through some food, see what happens with your blue bar, try to make some weird cuts like in the middle or when the food is in the air or something like that, collect a few stars and put it away.
Not worth of its price, but as a free mobile phone game it could be in some way get a recommendation. This product on Steam anyways is a huge no in my view.
