This game's a grind for the sake of being a grind, the entire game is filler. I was hoping the 1.0 launch would improve the gameplay loop a bit but unfortunately it's just too stale for me. The campaign is pointless pee pee poo poo humor that doesn't contain any meaningful story, the actual gameplay boils down to 3 buttons (primary skill, secondary skill, specialist skill) and 4 "ancestral" keys you'll rarely use because the effects are mid. Every map is "open breach, kill enemies (sometimes WAVES of enemies!), repeat until the next map where you do the exact same thing again. The "bosses" are basically just rare mobs from any other ARPG that have maybe one unique mechanic and then modifiers like extra regeneration or moving fast, very boring and very little to adapt to. Build diversity isn't non-existent, but it's very limited considering you're only ever going to be using 3 keys at a time. If you want to beat the game (kill the final boss) you have to grind for DOZENS of hours to get to the point of being able to fight it. Not because you need strong gear or you need to max out your skills or anything like that, but because the game is 100% filler and the dev put arbitrary restrictions on the final boss that require you to grind for the sake of grinding. I've played about 25 hours or so since the 1.0 release and I have great gear, I'm nearly max level, can do the highest torment level and I'm STILL probably another 25 hours off from fighting the final boss just because I have to grind through all the warlord junk at the end (more clear breach, go next, clear breach go next gameplay.) This game had a lot of potential and I really liked it back when the mage academy was the end of the campaign and I had hoped that as the game got closer to completion it would gain more substance and less filler but somehow the exact opposite happened. This game does some things well, the various slorm reapers have cool effects and the leveling/evolution/primordial system is pretty interesting. Gear crafting is deterministic and if you're willing to grind you can craft a nearly perfect piece of gear with zero chance of messing it up and there's a pure stat system that encourages you to try to find good gear off the ground as well if that's your thing. Each of the characters feel pretty good and unique, the few skills they have are fun to use with short skill trees to alter how they work. Overall, Slormancer would be a great diving in point if you're new to ARPGs and want something simple to start with. It's also a pretty good game to play while you watch a movie, youtube, or whatever because it's very easy and takes relatively little focus. If you've played Grim Dawn, Path of Exile 1 or 2, Last Epoch, Torchlight Infinite or Chronicon, those are all infinitely deeper games with more content than you'll find here.

I don't feel like this game values your time. Capping out certain content can take hours and hours of monotonous grinding just to get into a position to get some of the best gear possible, or to have the strongest slorm reapers (weapons). Then there's the Warlords update, which is riddled with all the awful tropes that make other ARPGs not shine as brightly; invulnerability phases, overtuned cataclysms, and a 2% grind chase for gear that requires more grinding on top just to make them perfect. Also, Warlords generally just feels really underbaked. There's no creativity in this mode that's just battlefields with extra steps, which is something people have been farming/grinding/playing for hours prior. I think the core of this game is fantastic, it feels like there's a lot of choices (but I think 90% of them aren't viable and it shows in the friction of how those elements interact with the game). But it went for so long without having a proper guide in it's own game for mechanics, and even now some things aren't very well worded or laid out in a way that helps you understand how mechanics interact. Everything feels like pulling teeth and spending 30 minutes on a forge for very, VERY small progression genuinely feels awful. Other RPGs have balanced this better, significantly so. I've spent a good amount of time in this game and I've played a LOT of other ARPGs. I can handle a bit of grind. But this just isn't it. Even with some of the changes since the launch of early access I just can't recommend it.

This is the Disgaea of the ARPG genre. You gain levels. Your skills gain levels. Your weapons gain levels. Your items gain levels. Wait, your weapons evolve? Uh, your levels gain levels? What, your critical hits can crit? Yup, and that's only a fraction of what the game is about and how it is smart and fun ! The story mode is quite short and humorous and only serve as an introduction to the Slormancer. It begins quite slow but give it two or three hours and then you won't be able to turn your computer off. There are an insane amount of possibilities inside the game, you can make any build you want and change very easily every time you are bored or find yourself lacking in power. You can reallocate every points spend, currency used in a few clicks and change from A to Z your playstyle. You can tweak every item you find, modifying stats, increasing its powers at your will to match your goals. And speaking of builds, each characters can go any any direction you want, each new weapon you get can basically completely change the way you will be playing! Knight with mana regen and elemental damage? Viable! Archer close combat with evasion? Viable ! Mage with heavy armor and thorns damage? Viable ! The possibilities are endless and the game, thanks to its weapon system, gives you general directions to follow, that is really smart! In most ARPG, you lock yourself into a stereotypical route and then you build around it. Here, it's the stuff you unlock which guide you in numerous surprising ways. I often found myself going down a way, only to find a new weapon, being amazed and changing my build and playstyle completely ! The game is basically as if you bought an ARPG like Diablo or PoE but it launches you into the endgame after 10 hours, but the endgame is massive because the game is constructed arount it ! And if you enjoy killing monsters and looting stuff and trying to make your dream builds work, you might be playing this game for a few hundred of hours, no less. These last years we saw a tremendous amount of games following the tendency launched by Vampire Survivors, simple games where you destroy hordes of monsters without needing to use more than two brain cells. Some of those games are great, but most are incredibly boring after a few hours because of the lack of thinking process while playing. ARPG have always been more stimulating because you have the same pleasure shredding loads of monsters but it also feels more rewarding thanks to the character building process. You aren't just mindlessly clicking on whatever upgrade the game launches at you, you are making impactful decisions and steering your game into the direction you chose. And that is what makes gaming really enjoyable to me. Having a goal, and getting there. Anyway, I digressed ! Excellent game if you like ARPG, character building, leveling up and endgame grinding hence my comparison this Disgaea at the beginning :)) You can feel the passion that has been fueling the development team for the genre here. Btw, it's a studio of two people, congratulations to them, it was worth it, true indie achievement ! (three if you count the compositer which made an excellent work with the music, I often find myself humming the melodies currently)

Play through the campaign until lvl 35-40, then grind until 100 to finish the campaign... W T F...

The game is by no means perfect, but it has kept me entertained for far longer than any other ARPGs like Diablo or Last Epoch.

At first glance (and to be clear that's all this game really is so far) this shows a lot of promise, but when actually stepping back and looking at the roadmap, there are some red flags. I am basing this EA review on what the game is right now, as in the value of buying right now, and on what sounds like is planned on the roadmap. Content right now is extremely minimal, and the content that has been talked about on the roadmap is just as minimal. This could change over the course of EA, and I will adjust this review as needed, but for right now there's not enough in the game and it seems like a bit of a risk to buy. I'll start with story. There essentially is no story. It says an irrational story, but really it's just a few quick lines of text leading you into the same map over and over. The current "act" is the graveyard, where you run what could very well be a procedurally generated version of the same tileset 16 times in a row to fight the same 3-5 enemies each time. The "story" that leads you through this is just a fetch quest with a moving target, you need to get some "important" item from the graveyard, so naturally the first thing you need is a shovel. You spend several maps looking for the person who owns the shovel, then several maps looking for the shovel, then several more looking for a way to repair the shovel, each separated by essentially a single line of "quest dialog" like "Haha, I forgot it was actually over in this other area." After which you instantly return to the graveyard and do another version of the map. It is minimal to say the least, even by ARPG standards, and there is no indication that the current Act 1 is just a placeholder. Story usually isn't that important to most people playing these games though. The issue is more variety, you have to go through the campaign to unlock game modes and progression devices, and act 1 is a single environment you do over and over fighting the same enemies over and over. There is also no indication that this will be changing, instead it sounds like on the roadmap each new act being added will consist of a single environment and 5 new enemies to fight on every level of that act. The act 2 environment is already in the game, it is called the prison and you can encounter the tileset in the current "endgame" mode, this tileset is even more repetitive than the graveyard. It consists of like a 5x3 block of rooms always in the same layout with a random locked door here or there forcing you to navigate it slightly differently each time you encounter it. It sounds like they will be adding 5 more environments over the next 2+ years for a total of 7. That sounds a bit sparse. Character customization, in some ways is decent, in other ways is essentially entirely lacking. The game takes a Diablo 3 approach where none of your decisions matter and there's no reason to make alts. In fact, you sort of can't make alts, there is no character creation in this game. You have 3 save slots, each save slot is progress independent and consists of all 3 classes that you can switch between at will. When you start a save you pick one of the classes to start with and after progressing through act 1 a bit you gain the ability to switch to the other two. As you level you gain stat points to place on a stat grid, these points can be instantly swapped to any other stat at any time for free, reaching certain threshold of one stat provides extra bonuses. As you use a skill you gain exp in it, 1 exp per use of the skill regardless of the level of enemies (or if you are even hitting an enemy, you can sort of AFK level a skill by holding it down on a map near an enemy that can't kill you), as you level a skill you unlock several tiers of exclusive upgrades that requires a resource essentially identical to exp that you collect from killed enemies. You can invest this skill exp into upgrades to strengthen skills of your choosing, swapping between these upgrades is also free and can be done anywhere, to get the exp back from the upgrades you need to talk to a NPC in town that takes a 10% cut, but this isn't worth it as it's pretty easy to max out every upgrade. There is a fair amount of "build" variety, combinations of skills and their upgrades, along with unique weapon effects, stat related effects, and future passive upgrades means you can take the same class and do many very different things with them. Since there is no motivation to start a new character to spend time building/playing these different options the replayability is extremely lacking which is generally the point of such build variety. Classes are also gender locked and the devs have said they don't plan to change that, if that is important to you. The focus of the game seems to be in the endgame grind, a system which isn't really in place yet so is hard to judge. The game allows you to craft "perfect" gear and upgrade it to a ridiculous degree which could take you hundreds of hours, but there seems to be little motivation to do so, it's mostly just incremental stat increases, and the idea of grinding the same 7 maps for hundreds of hours seems questionable to me. I did not run into any bugs or crashes, seemed pretty stable to me, but it sounds like it did have some issues running on higher resolutions and I'm not sure if they have been entirely fixed. The art style is alright, very low rez pixel art, minimal animations and no directional sprites (there's just a left/right facing sprite that is mirrored), but if you like 2D art the game has a decent style and looks pretty good. The soundtrack is pretty amazing, reminds me a lot of Disgaea and actually got me playing some of that again recently. I can't recommend buying the game at this point, I pushed it as much as I could and got bored long before the 12 hour mark. There just not enough here to justify a purchase yet. If it's a concept you like and hope to see it do better, supporting the devs now may help with that, but I consider this one a bit of a gamble. It has done reasonably well so far, this may cause them to extend the scope of development and add more than is planned on the roadmap, but unless that happens I'm not confident it will ever be more than a casual little title with an excessive optional grind. Check back in a year or two and see how things have changed.

i bought the game like 3 days ago and i have 14 hours played, im lvl 43 and loving ittttttttttttt! Edit: i may have a problem

Maybe it gets fun and addicting later but I will never find out because during the first hour I got so bored from running to the graveyard for the fifth time in a row that I fell asleep.

6 years of early access - and still boring. No dynamics in combat, uninteresting builds, just walking and clicking

better itemization and buildcraft than diablo 4

Just don't buy it yet. People claims that this game can allow wide variety of builds but in reality it's simply wrong. Try check any endgame build in Youtube. 99% of those builds uses "shoot multiple bolts that penetrate, does fork, and bounce" setup. For unknown reason, the devs aren't aware about it. Suggesting a change in their discord will makes their whiteknights angry and makes them either calls you toxic person or says STFU this is still early access. On top of that, as of today we have spent 4 month from the release; there are basically no progress whatsoever other than "hotfixes". They "hotfixed" saying totem type skill are extremely powerful so nerfed it to no existent where basically nobody used it for meta builds. Some people were suggesting that why they had to nerf totem instead of one of most powerful setup didn't got nerfed at all, then the whiteknights just came nowhere saying "you are sad guy if you only enjoyed totems in this game". It's completely missing the point. Also, after 4 month of release we still got basically 2 maps. The negative reviews are real. You can't expect any content so far; you are basically play testing rather than enjoying. If you just want to have good old school hack and slash, just grab Chronicon instead. The game had very smooth updates and the dev was actually listening the community. It got very deep build variety and you can have fun for any builds. Edit: We have spent 4 month+ after initial release, and they are still working on "hotfixes" without adding any real content. Like other reviews says, there are basically 7-8 type of enemies with two maps. We know it's "early access", but I am not sure changing game balance at very, very early stage of development helps anything.

Quite boring in the beginning overall and also got disappointed how boring were all of the specializations you unlock. Maybe they add more synergies in the end game, but for the most part each of the three specializations you have for each of the class just gives it one different active skill (like blink, turret or dash). Looking into all of the skills, potential end game synergies seem quite generic. Additionaly, repetitive maze-like environment is a let-down for sure too.

Better than Diablo IV Better than PoE2

Depressing and hopeless story that makes you want to crawl into a deep hole and cry? Nope. Whimsical and ironical story that cleverly pokes fun at the above? Yep. Sluggish, dawdling combat – just as one might expect from a pixel ARPG? Nope. Deliciously snappy and fluid combat – even in a pixel ARPG? Yep. 'Professional game development' from a AAA company? Nope. Surprisingly professional game development from a handful of devs? Yep. A massive, impressive, yet ultimately heartless world to explore? Nope. Several well-designed and delightful environments that eventually start to feel repetitive? Yep. A couple dozen meta builds, few of which are actually enjoyable to play? Nope. Dozens and dozens of viable builds, most of which are enjoyable to play? Yep. A fixed camera zoom that gives you a picturesque view of your character and also makes it impossible to actually play the bloody game? Nope. A reasonably good camera distance (after changing it in options) that allows you to, you know, see the enemies you're attacking? Yep. Loot? Yep. Lots of loot? Yep. Lots of loot you'll never use? Yep. Lots of loot you'll never use that can be filtered into materials which you'll later use to improve the actually good loot? Yep. Occasional loot that inspires a whole new way of building your character? Yep. A simple, intuitive way of modifying loot to make it perfect? Nope. An initially daunting but ultimately logical way of modifying loot to make it perfect? Yep. An obsessively grindy end game, which leaves you feeling that with the hours you've put in you could have cured cancer instead? Nope. An obsessively grindy end game, which leaves you feeling that with the hours you've put in you could have cured cancer instead, but then you wouldn't have found that sick legendary, and is cancer really THAT bad? Yep. Lightning Imbue Round: Best Reaper? Meticulous Primordial Sword of Resonating Thunder. Best hip thrust while casting an AOE spell? The Mage. Obviously. Bitchinest Ancestral Legacy moniker? Oppressive Cold Halo of Radiance. Bugs? A few, but no ant hives. Ant hives? Bees, man. Bees have hives. Baby's mama? First Torchlight. Baby's grandmama? Secret of Mana. Worth the price of admission? Emphatically Yep.

I want to start by saying I am an APRG veteran. I've played PoE 1 for over a decade, Last Epoch, Torchlight, and PoE 2. I've got my eyes set on "No rest for the Wicked" next, and decided to give "Slormancer" a try while I wait for a good sale. I am currently 76hrs deep, finding myself feeling neutral about game, and this is another time where I wish Steam had a mixed-review option to accurately reflect my feedback. Slormancer has a lot of charm and it is fun to play, but there is nothing to do EXCEPT grind. I know... ARPG's are for grinding. You kill, get loot, kill bigger stuff, get bigger loot. So here's what I mean... and I will describe many of these aspects with PoE terms in parentheses. This game has exactly 1 mechanic, called Breach (Clearly PoE inspired.) You step on the circle, monsters pop out, you kill them, the breach closes. There's 3 different sizes, which determine the power and frequency of monsters. Once you've completed enough breaches, a portal opens to a new area and you do it again. That's it. Periodically there's a mini-boss that will pop up, you smoke it, and go back to breaching. This game also has a crafting system, but everything is deterministic eventually. You can freely reroll (Chaos), lock stats, improve the stat range (Divine), and enhance each and every piece of gear until you have perfect gear. This is Including the level, so if you get a nice piece of gear early in the game, you can level correct it to your current level and keep it. You can also turn it into a legendary (effectively chancing) and reroll the legendary effect if you don't like it (Ancient orbs). Don't even have to find a new piece. Of course there are costs for these options, and while this is an exceptional quality of life, it also means there's no thrill to the loot. You don't get the dopamine hit of finding something cool for your build, everything is just a 'block of clay' that can be shaped into whatever you need, as you need it. There are 120 different weapons for each of the 3 characters, which have to be leveled, evolved, and have their primordial power unlocked. This is completed by just plowing through monsters. The weapons are found randomly from Breaches, not regular monster drops. These weapons all have various effects with fixed stat ranges, and will serve as the centerpiece of your build. You can swap them freely, even in an instance and any weapons you unlock on one character can be 'reconstructed' on another one, so you don't have find all 120 on every character. You can also swap characters at any time, but you do have to level them independently. And then there's a few game modes, The forge, which is a tower with 100 waves and you choose how dangerous the next X amount of waves will be based on the rewards offered (The Simulacrum). There's a Pure Slorm temple which is another tower, but with a fixed amount of waves per floor. The whole floor is just Breach with a timer, but idk how you'd even fail this. Any mediocre build can just plow through these floors. It's not challenging, or engaging. Just the same room, over and over with 5-10 quick waves of monsters and then the floor is cleared. Every 10 floors rewards you with an Ultimatum (which is more like a trinket from Heist or the relics from Sanctum) but it gives you a bonus stat that can only be scaled by enhancing the Ultimatum, and all other sources do not affect your character, positive or negative. So for example the Movement speed ultimatum means you don't need speed boots or speed rolls in your tree, because they will not add together, but it also means you can't be slowed cause the Ultimatum has your movement speed fixed. And that's about it... There is a lot of build diversity, because there's 120 weapons, but there is not enough to do to make me want to try 120 weapons. You breach until you boss, then you Forge to target farm specific items, and then go back to breaching. The final boss of the game is buried behind an absolute slog of breaching. And I will say, the pacing and power curve, need some correction. You will feel TOO strong, until suddenly you are TOO weak. There are massive walls in progression (I'm looking at you Adam and Ohm Agad), and I would have appreciated more rewarding thresholds while trying to surmount those challenges. Lastly, I think this game has a lot of potential. I imagine the studio has plans to add more stuff in the future, but this game is truly a skeleton in it's 1.0 state. I do not expect this game to be PoE, or Last Epoch, but a singular mechanic is just not entertaining enough for the number of hours they may 'expect' someone to play this. I certainly wouldn't expect a single player game to be an RNGfest, but a little RNG makes things exciting and adds to the chase. I will not talk about the story or game balance, because it doesn't matter. No one plays ARPGs for their story, but if you want a good laugh it's in here. Balance doesn't matter either because there will always be something that's dominant, and you can choose to play something like that or just freestyle it. The game is structured in a way where you can play whatever you want, it will work for the most part. I would like to see a BGM selection at some point in the future. The music in this game is really cool but I have a couple tracks I'd prefer not to listen too. And I think I'll close by saying, if you're just down to smash through endless hordes of monsters and make a 'perfect' build, you can do that here. But be aware, there is no variety in how you'll approach this task. You will be breaching until your eyeballs fall out. If you read to this point, you will see I am continuing to play and that's because I always make a good attempt to finish what I start, but I currently don't recommend this experience as a whole. If you're one of those sociopathic grinders, I probably already said what you wanted to hear, so have fun!

Game I think has potential to be good but the beginning was very boring. From lvl 3-10 or so, I just went to the exact same NPC at the left edge of the castle and kept doing the same boring maps on repeat for an hour. Not sure when you start getting some more variety but it felt like playing PoE if you never get off the starting beach and just play the entire campaign there.

Unfortunately after playing it a bit and asking on their discord server, it seems the game is designed to be very easy, almost like an idle game. Was hoping for some challenge, so I am disappointed. If you are looking for a game anywhere near the difficulty of even poe2, then look elsewhere.

Too easy, too grindy, too slow, too talky. The mountains of unlocks work against them here, because they flood you with resources you cannot use because they require other resources that they don't give you until you grind for ages. You harvest slorm, which can be used to upgrade this massive tree of ancestral powers... except you can't, because they require ancestral stones that, as of an hour or so of play, they have not given me any of. Alternately, you can spend it on weapon upgrades... except you can't, because you have to kill hundreds of enemies with your same basic boring attacks so you can 'level up' the skill (which does nothing) in order to be able to spend these points to *actually* level them up. You crush pots for pathetic amounts of gold, which you can then spend on.... I don't know. Something, presumably. Eventually. Once you unlock the ability to spend currency to unlock things, which probably then just unlocks the ability to unlock the ability to let you buy actual abilities. It's just more mountains of needless grind for its own sake. You like gear drops? Yeah, they got those. You will get all kinds of boots and shoulders and chestpieces giving you such riveting choices as whether to get +35 hp and 0.5% attack speed, or +30 hp and some amount of some stat they don't explain and you don't notice, because it's probably on par with zero-freaking-point-five PERCENT attack speed. 1/200 increases to stats aren't even worth the text space to describe them. Zero serotonin drops all around, it's a total snoozefest looking through your gear page. Characters talk... and talk... and tell you to fetch protein shakes so they can exposition you some more, before running you across town to talk to some other guy. I'm fine with story, but if you can make it to the first actual fight in this game without spamming 'skip dialogue' (at least they let you do that), then kudos to you and your saint-like patience. They will then send you to some pathetically easy, short, unrewarding dungeon, before forcing you back to town for more talking. The fights are so easy that all of the time they spent making these pages-long upgrades (that you can't take anyway) seems extra pointless. I feel like this is the sort of game that tries to bait you into playing two hours before you can actually do anything fun or meaningful, so you're stuck with the purchase when you inevitably realize it isn't worth it. I'm onto their tricks. Solid thumbs down.

Wait on this one. There's not much to do in this game but kill the same 4 mob types... Same maps... Yes, it's very in depth but I dunno, it's so easy it's kinda boring. The graphics are amazing, they're going in the right direction with this one, if they keep at it it'll be great, as for right now It's samey and there's no learning curve to it. Not one boss/mob could touch you, everything is telegraphed, there's no challenge. Wait a while, then revisit this one. I only gave this a thumbs down because I really can't give this a thumbs up in good conscious. Curator Page https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27040334-DuhGamingSavage/

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuuKF2g4Vyw

What Bangs?

• The skill system has an insane amount of customization available. You get three classes with 8 skills that each of 8 levels of mods with 2-4 mods per level.
• This is over 200 different unique skill mods
• Dozens of different weapons per class
• Even in the initial release there is up to hundreds of hours of grinding that can be done to max out all the different characters/skills/weapons
• The story is just getting started but it’s a little quirky and funny and off to a great start

What Hangs?

• There is no multiplayer and a lot of people have expressed disappointment with that
• The combat early in the game feels really flat. It gets better as you unlock new skills and start to customize things, but I think it could be better overall
• There are about a half a dozen to a dozen enemies in the game right now. Their roadmap points out that they are going to be adding a lot more, but you definitely feel the repetitive enemies in the current version
• The merchant is unconventional and somewhat obtuse. You have to pay A LOT of money to be able to buy things, and even then the selection is like a bodega on its last legs.

Very mediocre game. 1. It offers no challenge to the player. 2. The story is boring, bland, and simply bad. 3. The game claims it has 100's of skills, when it actually has 8 skills for each class, and you only have 3 classes. 4. The world, and dungeons are extremely boring to play through and look at. 5. Extremely low variation of enemies, enemy skills, enemy movements. On a good day, the game gets a 4/10 rating. Anyone that says otherwise is highly delusional, has almost no experience with video games, does not understand quality, and does not appreciate his/her time. I would only play this game if there is absolutely nothing else to play.

I don't recommend this game SOLELY for the Adam Nostrus fight. That is the most annoying fight I have ever played in any game. Everything in that fight is that god awful green and you can't see anything coming at you. It is the worst design for a game since ET for the Atari. The game itself is cool, but that fight is so fucking gay that even two dudes fucking would look at it and be like, yo that's pretty gay.

This game is absolutely terrible. Occasionally, you run into one feature that completely ruins the game, and this is one of them. Too much manage usage on skills. Half of the time I spend in any map, is waiting for my mana to regenerate. What on earth? Where did the idea that this was good design originate from?

It was a bit slow to start but shaping up to be a charming little ARPG with lots of spell upgrade options and endless loot. Would love to see co-op added in the future. However, I don't like the name or the word SLORM itself. Also you collect SLORM in the game but the game is called SLORMANCER so that would really make it SLOR and MANCER, so why am I not collecting SLOR? It would have had to be SLORMMANCER. What is SLORM ANCER? I don't like it.

Decided to run in a small window on startup. And as you can't navigate menues with keyboard and the mouse didn't stay in the window, you can't change the settings. This is literally unplayable.