The Slormancer

I don't dislike the game, its cute, and at glance seems to check the boxes. But honestly, the combat is literally the same over and over again, and you have to go through so many of the same repetitive stages to unlock minimal changes that are some what standard elements for this sort of game from the start. Maybe its a slow burn to something better, but after 8 hours of the same things, I'm willing to call it.

I thought it was okay while going through the campaign, but hit a point where the game forces you to just grind the same 3 things over and over before you can fight the final boss, and I lost interest after a while because it's the same enemies in the same rooms/environments, and by this point I've gotten all my skills unlocked so I don't really feel like I'm progressing beyond meeting some arbitrary metric to fight something new. At this point best I could get in terms of variation is another weapon or legendary piece of gear, but even then the special effects on most of those boil down to stat increases and won't liven up your gameplay. Maybe it gets better after the grind but I'm done with this for now. Outside of my issues with the game, I will say I really appreciate that the game lets you redo your skills for free at any time and I like the art style and animations.

The game was a funny hack and slash with a silly story. The art style is nice and so are the musics. It was enjoyable until I've finally reached the door of the final boss. At that point the game screeches to a halt and tells me: "no can do, you first need to ..." [list] [*]Go from 13 to 50 influence [*]Defeat 7 more battlefield bosses [*]Increase my character level by 4 [*]Reinforce an item to level 6 [*]Upgrade an ultimatum to level 3 [*]Upgrade a reaper rune to level 3 [/list] Basically, increase some numbers related to random dungeons exploration, looting, "crafting", ... No new dungeon, no silly quest or any story-driven excuse to progress, just a mindless statement. That's about 10 hours worth of mindless grind. At first I really thought it was some kind of joke: a sleight against badly made games, and that I would be allowed to proceed after a silly dialogue. It was not a joke. This is the laziest, most artificial way to increase the duration of a game. I won't finish it and I don't recommend you ever begin.

初めは気軽に、そして爽快に遊べるハクスラゲーとして楽しみ間違いなく人におすすめできるゲームと思っていましたが途中からクリア後のやりこみ要素のような物をクリアに必須要素として入れられており、しかもそれがかなりしんどい内容なので低評価に変わりました。 　 　突然ストーリー途中に（といってもチュートリアルが終わった直後）このままではボスに負けるから強くなれと言われ試練が始まるのですが、それは3部あり、1部ではまぁまぁやり込めばクリアできますが2部では指定されたフロアまで行きボスを倒すものや連続で100ウェーブクリアしないといけないものがあります。これも指定された以上の難易度で1ウェーブにつき小さいウェーブが100あり、しかも合計ウェーブクリア数じゃなく”100回連続クリア”です。私は連続で2時間半掛かりました。 　あと指定されたレベルまで上げる必要、リーパールーンというアイテムを指定数見つけないといけない。 そしてキツかったのはNPCを倒さないといけない課題。それまで数十時間やってきたキャラが瞬殺されるレベルで、このために何度もダンジョンをマラソンしアイテムを集めてを繰り返しやっと倒せましたが、Steam実績を見ると倒せた人は今日現在で9.5%しかいません。9割以上の人が辞めています。 これでやっと2部が終わりまだ3部が残っています。 何がキツイかというと、敵やダンジョンの種類がとても少なく完全な作業としか感じない所と、メイン武器が各職業につき100位？あり色々な性能の武器があるのですが記述したつまらない試練によりバランス的に自由度が無くなり一つしか使わなくなりさらに作業感が増した所です。 　私はどのハクスラゲーも各職業を一度はクリアするというのが好きなのですがこのゲームに関しては新キャラでまた初めからはやりたくないです。 ストーリーも惹きつけられるものだったらまだ頑張れますが内容はパロディやお笑い要素が強く魅力にかけるので原動力になりません。 やっぱりインディーズゲームって大分ハードルが下げられて評価されていると常々思います。これもそのうちの一つだと思います。大手のディアブロとかが同じような事をしたらめちゃくちゃ叩かれていたでしょう。

This is a decent game, right until you reach a certain point before the final boss. The game forces you to engage in a series of "trials" to progress forward, which consists of an extremely repetitive grind against the same groups of enemies, in the same areas and with very little variation in loot. There is no way to bypass this stage and you are forced to grind countless hours of the same, monotonous content just to progress. This totally killed my interest in progressing forward and I have no idea what the developers were thinking by implementing such a poor gameplay decision. Avoid this game like the plague, unless you have the patience of a saint or a particular fondness for bland and repetitive content.

WHY THE GRIND?! [tl;dr: Unneccessary story progression block that forces into massive grind to stretch out play time; game stats don't get explained and can are confusingly named. Frustrating!] I had Slormancer on my wishlist for quite some time and as it hit 1.0, I bought it on the spot. I started out with the mage, opted in for the arcane commander subclass and had a fairly good time. Found some items that enhanced XP-gain early on, and was happy to find the option to adjust the difficulty of a level to my character, since I was above the suggested player levels for mission fast. I found my build rather powerful, since I blasted through the missions with ease, most of the time. The humor is over the top silly but I found it enjoyable and the story isn't bad either, as far as I can tell. So I had fun... until I cleared the second to last area and the game hit with a bunch of road blocks that, even though I was overleveled already, forced me into a grind fest. Three "challenges" I have to overcome to "make sure I'm ready for the final boss". Oh, boy. Now I'm stuck wasting crafting materials on items that I'm bound to replace quickly. Level up weapons and fully beat arena type scenarios. Increase "Influence" to an absurd amount, a game mechanic that hasn't has not been of ANY importance up til now, as far as I can tell. And fight a mock battle against a boss that employs tactics and attacks that ALL, without exceptiopn, one-hit me with my (so far extremely effective) glass cannon build, which I have all not encountered a single time in any other battle against a boss or elite enemy. One of the attacks is apparently one where he just teleports next to me, gets a hit in and kills me, btw. The mechanics for refining gear are... okay, I guess. Find raw materials or salvage unused gear. Then make the upgrade materials you want from scraps and start changing and adjusting stat values with some amount of control over the outcome. Still a lot of RNG involved. So you need a lot of money and materials, which you get from different scenarious. Invetntory management for this crafting system is a bit bonkers though. You have an infinite inventory for materials. But they are added to your very finite item inventory in the beginning and you have to click on a little button to transfer them into the other inventory. Also, higher grade materials come almost exclusively from scrapping items. With no way to upgrade your item inventory, you will go in and out of farming runs a lot. Also... there are tons of game stats. And most of them don't get explained properly. Some of them don't get explained at all. What is the difference between thorn and retaliation damage? When does damage count as raw and when does it count as elemental? What is overdrive? What is an ancestral strike? For example, my subclass, the arcane commander, summons "arcane clones of himself", so I went and smithed increased minion damage onto some of my items. Well... turns out the clones this subclass uses (there is one that creates "other" aracane clones, still named the same) count as "totems" (because these ones stay stationary) and are thus affected by the "totem increased effect" stat. A stat that appears much less because it isn't a viable option for many enhancement slots. Silly me. Also, my main attack, which the mimic, isn't an attack, but a spell. So attack speed does nothing, and I have to go for cooldown reduction... Just as my spells do raw damage instead of elemental damage while a lot of my skill options suggest that it might be elemental damage. I wanted to give it a chance. But now I find myself starting up the game, trying a challenge or making a farming run, until my little inventory is full. And then I have already lost interrest and quit again. The sad thing is, if the progression block were just a bunch of fun challenges after the main story, this would not be an issue, I think. I would have received it very differently. But as it is, it seems and feels like a cash grab that forces you into playing it, not being respectful towards your probably limited time for gaming, letting you enjoy the story long enough, so that you can't get a refund, and then turns into a free-to-play grind fest for a mobile. Maybe I'll finish the story. Maybe I'll just uninstall. Anywway, I'll likely never touch it again.

While the Slormancer offers fun gameplay and good graphics, it turns into an engineered grindfest that just direspects the player's time. The first 10 hours are great. You go through different biomes, unlock skills, upgrade your character, free the villagers which unlocks new functionalities... It's ok. Then comes the first trial, which requires you to grind through the "Expedition system". It becomes less interesting, but at least you learn the ropes of it, and you deepn your understanding of the mechanics. Then comes the second trial, and I had to stop there. It requires to grind even more while adding no novelty at all. Everything becomes grindy as hell. All the upgrade costs increase exponentially all the time, while your skills have become capped. And all of that has been designed on purpose. Why? Why??? On top of that, the system is extremely convoluted. You have very many different "resources": gold, XP, slorm, slormites, slormlines, pure slorm, elder slorm, spirits... And everything levels up. Your character levels up. Your skills level up. Your weapon levels up. Your pieces of equipment level up. And they all level up according to a different system. Your character levels up with XP, your skills level up with use and slorm, your weapon levels up with use, your equipment with use and slormites... Since all of it is such a grind, it also prevents from experimenting too much. And I'm not mentioning ancestral legacy, ultimatums, ultimatums level up (with pure slorm), runes, runes level up (with spirits)... Worst of it, the game provides very little guidance. It even trolls you in this respect. At the beginning of each map you have a stupid "tip" like "Dying is bad", "Attack the enemies to kill them". It could have been a great opportunity to provide actual game tips, but no. Some useful stuff like "You gather influence for each biome by participating to expeditions" would have been welcomed. But no... They prefer to make fun of you. In the end, Slormancer is a missed opportunity. It devolves into a repetitive, tedious, constrained grindfest, despite an excellent core, with fast-paced action and good 2D graphics. If you like the genre, I'd recommend getting Children of Morta instead, which is far better.

[u]The Bad [/u] There is too much repetitive grinding required after the campaign just to get yourself geared up to fight the mid game and final boss. The map layouts are absolutely horrible with multiple dead ends every map. There are cataclysms (map modifiers) that completely brick certain builds. There are frame drops if you play a build with many effects even on a high end PC, probably because this was made on GameMaker which has no multi-threading. God forbid you play a build triggering multiple effects multiple times a second on the steam deck. Lots of reported and acknowledged bugs that are not fixed, the last patch was on 9th July 2025 which is over 1 year ago. Especially game breaking ones such as text and minimap randomly blurring and disappearing, being able to die while portalling to the next floor resulting in bricked runs, and not being able to choose audio output resulting in no sound. Their subreddit was also put up for adoption recently by the reddit modsupport bot. The font size on PC is fine but on the steam deck it is too small even on max setting. No modding. [u]The Good [/u] The story is simple and humorous. The build variety is crazy, this proven by my hours in the game. There are working build planners as well as a huge build compendium on their discord. Melee, bow, spells, damage over time, minions, retaliation and even 0 button walking simulator builds are all possible. The campaign is short and sweet, you can complete it within 3 hours and move on to the end game quickly. You can skip the campaign on your alternate class characters. You can endlessly improve your gear if you want to, but it is pretty pointless as there is no infinitely scaling content.

This is not a game for you UNLESS: a) you're somewhat autistic and love running 5 of the same maps in POE or Diablo all the time, b) you've lost your will to live, have nothing better to do or a lot of free time to waste. To save you some time (unlike devs): Slormancer is not a completely bad game. It's quirky and grindy but you don't get rewarded whatsoever. Level up? Oh, nice. Some meaningless stat went up. Constant upgrades behind a few different mechanics that require hours of grind? Oh, another number went up a little bit. You may say it's core gameplay in ARPG games... and that's true as long as you have anything that rewards time you spend with either new mechanics or new content. These rewards end around 10 hours in. After that you don't really see anything fresh except a few build-enabling stats or items that will only work in endgame and even then they're underwhelming. You just grind for the sake of grinding and numbing your brain from the pain of existence. It's yet another single player game that requires you to grind just to give you nothing in return. Why? For no particular reason. It looks like there are some people in the game's community that keep defending such design decisions and get pretty offensive towards anyone who has any feedback or thoughts on that (just take a look at discussion section threads where people have their thoughts or questions). Everything points to those people having influenced the devs into making that sad grindfest. It could rival much bigger hack n' slash games on the market, be really popular and grow into a game worth recommending. Instead it's a game with around 100 players. I got this game in 2022 when devs still kept looking for a direction so I gave them some time and picked it back up lately. Almost nothing changed, just an empty bubble got bigger. Hardly any lore and lackluster biome/environment variety. Music-wise it's okay-ish but since there's not much environment, there's not much background music either but it sounds good enough. Visually the later it gets, the less you see - either one huge explosion or a cluster of many different effects that also blend all the sounds together into a bland noise. The difference in balance between classes is so huge that once you play a different one, you don't feel incentivized to come back and grind the first to the endgame. Of course, Huntress is a poster child that has to be strong but come on, she's overpowered compared to the other two. It doesn't need nerfs since it's a single-player but why won't anyone just tweak some numbers (either skills or Reapers) to give players a reason to try something fresh and make it somewhat playable? Maybe because it looks like abandonware. The last update was in July 2025 with some bug fixes. It's been almost a year and there are still bugs that are close to being gamebreaking (e.g. disappearing text during the Forge expedition) or there's a lot of QOL changes missing that've been requested for years (like HUD/text scaling). Even though devs are posting monthly updates, there's nothing else that proves their existence. You also can't really see any incentive to theorycraft or tweak your build. Even though the crafting system is nice to understand and player-friendly, you have to waste half your points in a POE-like tree on nodes that are completely useless to you and there's no real workaround. Is there? Oh, right. Just go raw damage with crit and you're set with your build. Why'd you bother doing something else when your damage numbers can go brrrr... It's good that you've got free respecs (skills, attributes or ancestry tree) but tweaking anything will likely just waste your time... Time that you can spend on a game where devs actually respect you and your time. Even on sale, this game is too expensive for what it has to offer as there are more player-respecting games that are cheaper as well as more polished ones in the same or slightly higher price bracket.