Slay the Spire - Uncompleted Review

 

Just one more try, before you look up it will be 1am and you have work in the morning. Slay the Spire should come with a warning. The monsters in the game will chomp away at your health but this game will devour your time.

You start the game with The Ironclad character and play strikes & block cards to defeat monsters. Along the way you will unlock new cards, open treasure chests to receive a relic, gain a boon, receive a curse & even visit a merchant to spend your hard earned gold. At some point eventually you will die usually at the hands of the end of act boss fight or an elite monster. Thus begins the one more try loop, let’s go again and see how far we get this time. 

After a while you will unlock two more characters in The Silent a huntress who uses daggers and poison and The Defect a machine who uses elemental orbs to attack. There is also a fourth character called The Watcher but you need to complete a run before she is unlocked. I prefer to play with The Silent and if I get some poison cards I can get a decent run together.

I usually play games that have a story and an ending because the time I can spend on video games is limited. Therefore I avoid rogue like games or as I like to call them timesinks like Spelunky, Binding of Isaac and FTL Faster Than Light because of the amount of hours you have to play to either upgrade or get lucky to complete a run. Although at some point I am looking forward to playing Hades.

Slay the Spire is no exception to this formula, after 30 hours playing I finally made it to Act 3! & promptly died at the first fight. I read a post on Reddit recently where someone mentioned they had played for 300 hours and had still not completed the game, that made me stop and think about the time commitment this game needs and whilst I won’t quit just yet it is time to move on. I will continue to slowly chip away at Slay the Spire and if I’m lucky I may just complete a run before the PlayStation 6 is released.

I’m going to start playing The Pathless an open world action game developed by Giant Squid who also made Abzu. Just let me have one more try on Slay the Spire.