Slayer Shock seems woefully underbaked.
In Slayer Shock, you play through a series of missions, earning "Vampire Dust" with which to unlock new skills, weapons, and intel. Missions take place in a series of procedurally generated levels that make up your town. On each mission you sneak and fight your way across a map to complete an objective, which amounts to either "kill several elite vampires" or "walk to the following locations and press the use key".
As you complete missions, the town builds up terror and gradually shuts down in an Arkham Horror or X-Com-ish way. Every mission the place you go to will go up or down depending on your success, two other places go up, and an event may throw some additional random-ness into the mix. Eventually you die or research the final mission and complete it and the "season" ends.
Repeat this across five seasons of increasing difficulty with skills and equipment carried over, then start a new "generation" and repeat everything you've done before over again with an increased difficulty and a "rogue vampire" ally.
This all sounds quite good, but the problem is all of it is unsatisfying and bare bones. None of it feels that good, has any depth, or possesses any of the variety and sense of discovery that made Eldritch compelling.
Maps are pretty much boring, linear canyons littered with obstacles, light sources, and structures in a way that doesn't come together in an interesting fashion.
Stealth feels half-baked. Moreso, it's poorly explained and presented. There's neither much of a visibility indicator nor much of a tutorial on how it works to let you figure that out absent explicit UI feedback. You mostly have to assume that basic video game conventions apply. Definitely don't run, don't be in front of enemies, stay out of light sources and be careful with your flashlight. Noisy terrain bad? Crouching good? Smashing things make noise? Cornfields provide visual cover? No idea, although I've smashed some stuff pretty close to bad guys and haven't worken them so I'm guessing not all of those apply.
Ambiguity aside, there's just not enough interesting terrain, mechanics, or enemy behaviors to make sneaking particularly interesting. Look at the map and the enemy patrol patterns, guess where you can avoid being too in front of the enemies, and go for it, and that's about it. If you aren't on a hard enough difficulty to mandate it, you'll almost certainly find yourself sprinting across every map just to make it end faster.
Enemy variety is poor. There are five kinds of enemies, and you'll likely see four of those on your first mission. They vary slightly in what attack and evasion patterns you'll want to engage them with but are all dead simple. Denser enemies on harder difficulties complicate matters, but that just means you'll need to be a little careful about aggro and kite a lot, or engage with the tedious stealth game. The only remotely interesting thing here is that werewolves fight vampires, allowing you to use enemies against each other somewhat.
The game is also paired with incredibly uninteresting combat. Weapons have minimal animation and sound effects, and enemies show no reaction to being struck until the killing blow.
Firing a crossbow, for example, consists of pulling the trigger, seeing a slow-moving smoke ring come off the front (I guess it's a gunpowder-powered crossbow?), and maybe your enemy drops about 15% of their health and notices you. Sometimes it doesn't hurt them, and with no visible projectile it's hard to tell if that's due to inaccuracy or a range cap on the weapon. Melee attacks are even worse- simple swipes with no sense of impact.
Mechanically, the situation is no better. Other than whiffing at your opponent with your main weapon until their health bar is empty, combat offers some basic damage resistance mechanics to encourage you to mix up weapons, a push/stun, and if you sneak up on an enemy you can inflict double damage if you've researched the skill. That's about the lot of it.
Overall, combat feels feels weightless and repetitive.
Previews of this game in the media made a big deal about the game being about learning about your enemies and figuring out how to defeat them, with phrases like "Ideally, you shouldn't succeed the first time you encounter a threat". (from Rock, Paper, Shotgun) This seems entirely absent from the game. With the shallow monster pool you won't regularly be encountering anything new, and the bosses appear to be simply HP and attack rate buffed versions of a normal monster with different damage resistances.
Research consists of spending X dust and waiting for Y days to get info about the "big bad". The first research tells you who and how many, which doesn't seem to do anything. Then you can research three things in any order. First, where the big bads are- presumably to avoid encountering them, although that's just a guess because encountering and beating them early doesn't seem to give you anything. Secondly, you can learn the monster's vulnerabilities and resistances, which is obviously useful. Finally, you can unlock the final mission which will let you end the game.
As I played Slayer Shock, my wife watched me play and said "This is an Early Access game, right?" No, it's not and it costs $20, but it sure feels like somewhere between a very nicely polished free internet game, and an early access game that's got a solid framework in place but that hasn't been fleshed out at all. I'd recommend you save your money. There's little content and even less depth here.
