An Ingenious Roguelike That Runs out of Rewards Too Early
If we had a quid for every roguelike one-armed bandit game there was on the Xbox, we’d have two quid. Cloverpit takes the ‘cherries and nudges’ path, trying to emulate the fruit machines you see down the pub, while Slots & Daggers wants to obscure its gambling origins. It’s a fruit machine as an adventure, the reels of the machine representing the actions in an RPG. Cherries turn into swipes of an axe, fireballs, loot and shields.
Having played far too many idle RPGs, the idea of handing spells and attacks over to the whims of RNG makes a kind of sense. The sense of control moves away from which attack you use, to what gear you set them up with in the first place. Does your adventurer hunker down like a tank, countering with weapons that do damage based on the armour they’ve accumulated? Or do you emphasise magic, which ignores the enemy’s shield and gets right to the enemies’ fleshy cores?
Less Role-Playing, More Reel-Playing
Slots & Daggers, as is the fashion, is run-based. You start the game with a sword, shield and coin, each of which gets slotted into the reels of the one-armed bandit. Then the quest starts, and you’re confronted with enemy after enemy. You spin your three reels, attack for each sword, gain armour for each shield, and gain coins for each, well, coin. Spin three-of-a-kind and you get a Critical Hit. That’s a windfall of damage, armour or gold.
The agency kicks in after each enemy. Any gold you have accumulated can be spent on new items for your reels, upgrades to the stuff already on the reels, and relics which come in two flavours: passive ‘always-on’ benefits, and items that can be activated after each turn, usually with a coin cost. Strategy starts to take a front seat. Do you add awesome new benefits to your reels, but risk diluting your chance of a Critical Hit? Do you swap out an item from your reel? A small shield for a bulkier one, perhaps?
Enemies have slightly different make-ups, being shield-heavy, or having attacks that get exponentially more powerful (becoming a problem for slower builds). But chew through enough of them and you move from biome to biome, from swamps to wild-wests to catacombs.
A Fruit Machine With Upgrades
This being a roguelike, death isn’t too far in front of you. It is impossible to win Slots & Daggers on the first run – it’s not that brand of roguelike – so you will be quickly back to the Modifiers Shop, where you can spend the credits you accumulated by being awesome in the main game. This meta shop gives you access to stuff you might expect, like increased health, armour, damage-prevention and DPS, but also some stuff you might not. Extra reels are the Holy Grail, the ones you want to immediately prioritise, while an extra life is always welcome.
Runs also garner you new shop stock, and even new starting items. It won’t be long before you’re deliberating over whether you should start with magic or melee, health regeneration or shields. Weapons become a head-scratcher. Depending on mood, we opted for a poison dagger build, nibbling away at health and ignoring armour, or a Warhammer build that had the ability to stun the enemies.
For the first ten-or-so runs, Slots & Daggers was as dangerously addictive as a fruit machine. Runs were relatively quick but rewarding. Invariably, I would have unlocked two or three new relics or starting items, and they were all much better than what I had before. But, more importantly, I had an extra reel to try out, or +100% melee damage to enjoy. Some roguelikes fail to make you feel stronger with each run. Slots & Daggers is a completely different breed. Every run leapfrogs the previous one, and then some.
While there isn’t a huge amount of agency over the outcomes, Slots & Daggers does still hand you control when it matters. Some of the higher-level items have twitchy minigames – roaming targets on the enemy to depict a catapult or bow and arrow, for example – which keep you awake, and the shops keep you thinking. Some of the unlocks are rare but 30 or 40 coins in cost, so we would often keep that much cash in reserve just in case an extra reel popped up in the early game, or a diamond or x2 reel appeared.
A One-Armed Bandit That Steals Your Time
But Slots & Daggers has a short fuse. As roguelikes go, it’s not a long one: you will be exhausting the Modifier Shop in roughly seven or eight hours, and you will reach the final boss in roughly the same amount of time. You could argue that a discrete, completable roguelike that doesn’t demand all your time is a good thing, and we would agree with you. We would love for there to be more games that treat your time with respect.
But, oddly, Slots & Daggers doesn’t have a huge amount of respect for your time either, and that’s what stops it short of a recommendation. Once you pass the ten-run, first few hours of Slots & Daggers, the enjoyment drops dramatically. You’re so powerful that enemies don’t represent much of a challenge. But you have to fight all these unchallenging enemies, and there are a significant number of sponges before you can get back to where you last died. You can also roll coins, over and over, doing very little damage to an enemy, when you’re just wishing for the fight to be over. Nothing in the options allows you to speed things up, either.
I don’t know why there wasn’t a purchasable level-skip. Slots & Daggers dearly needed it, and there was plenty of room in the shop. Because if you are loaded with modifiers, the opening levels are as lifeless as any idle game. And the lack of interest stretches beyond just the battles. Once you’ve upgraded everything, the shop can’t offer you anything of value outside of a HP-increasing cheese. There’s little motivation to switch a reel out for another one, as you’d lose something fully upgraded for a reel that’s basic.
A Game That Would Benefit From Some Try-Before-You-Buy
It all makes for a complicated game to recommend to someone. Slots & Daggers is clearly a niche title already: you have to be okay with handing your character over to the gods of RNG, and the A button is mostly there to stop reels from spinning. And while it burns ever-so-brightly for a few hours, it becomes a slog for the remainder. Your character quickly outpaces the enemies, to the point that they offer no challenge, but you still have to wade through oh so many of them.
I’d love it if there were more short, dense, satisfying roguelikes on the market. Give me that ‘one-more-go’ rush, but only for a few hours. For a time, Slots & Daggers looked like it would fit that category. But even this short roguelike overstayed its welcome, running out of unlocks and patience before the end. If you can stomach putting Slots & Daggers down before its grindy end, there’s a few hours of fun to be had.
Important Links
Spin Your Way Through Fantasy Battles In Slots & Daggers On Xbox And Play Anywhere – https://www.thexboxhub.com/spin-your-way-through-fantasy-battles-in-slots-daggers-on-xbox-and-play-anywhere/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/slots-daggers/9ntz0cvqc5df
