I have been keeping an eye on Rack and Slay over the past year. Despite my growing roguelike fatigue, this one felt different.
Welcome back to another episode of ‘Scar Tries’, the show where I try to work through the growing list of new additions to my Steam library while consuming as much coffee as I can. The past few months have been extremely busy, with September alone adding a ton of interesting games to my radar. My new laptop is working rather nicely, and with the upgraded specs I will finally be able to play more demanding titles without the machine crying with agony. That is always pleasant.
With the enormous success of Vampire Survivors, Steam is saturated with similar addictive titles that seek to fill some of that buffet table. Vampire Survivors has done incredibly well, offering hundreds of hours of gameplay for its small price tag, and it has forced many to take note of how to price their games. Rack and Slay takes a new twist on the ordinary roguelike model, bringing billiards to the battlefield! It spent a while in Early Access before a full launch on May 27 this year.
Out of all these ‘VampireEsque’ games, Rack and Slay is probably my favorite one. The gameplay premise is simple. In randomly generated dungeons that resemble a billiard table, players have 10 shots to clear as many enemy balls as possible. For every enemy that remains after using up all your shots, you take 1 point of damage before the board is cleared for the next level. Naturally, being a squishy ball, you will not last long if you fail to clear the table! There are plenty of obstacles and enemies to contend with on the battlefield that spice up the gameplay.
Along with the dungeon scenarios, you get a bunch of different power ups and modifiers in classic roguelike form. Some boost your HP or attack power, while others provide bonuses or special abilities when you knock an enemy ball out. With hundreds of combinations and multiple difficulty levels, there is a lot at work here. Rack and Slay ain’t easy especially on harder modes, but I found myself enjoying the challenge. This is a rare example when I willingly set everything to the hardest difficulty mode just to see how I fare up. That’s a testament of how to balance difficulty. Even when I make a mistake, it is down to my poor tactical mistake rather than the fault of the game.
For just $5.99, Rack and Slay is more than worth the price of entry.
