HellSlave II took me on a trip down memory lane. Back when I first started playing RPGs, I was very simple-minded. I would go for the biggest warrior I could find, give him the biggest sword I could find, and just beef up attack. Invariably I’d carve through the first quarter of the game before hitting something that required tactics, and it would all fall apart. Then I went through an extended ‘mage phase’, where I’d pick some sort of magic hero and try to play a bit smarter. Unfortunately, I’m not tremendously smart when it comes to battle tactics. So when a gigantic fireball didn’t do the trick, I was out of ideas.
HellSlave II allowed me to find some sort of middle ground. Though on the surface, it looks like I’m back to basics. After all, I went with the warrior, and specialised him into an angry warrior. But HellSlave II‘s lovely combat allowed me to think a bit deeper. I went for gear that allowed me to claw back time and to reflect damage, before stacking on a bunch of shield points. By the end I was gleefully laughing as all my foes broke upon me. I hadn’t been this enthralled with a dungeon crawler for a long time. It goes to show that excellent combat, lovely design and an interesting world can paper over a lot of cracks that are inherent to the genre.
Big Angry Men
HellSlave II opens with us looking for a mate of ours. We find him being casually tortured in a nearby cave, and take him back to town. Before we can reminiscence, however, a man trapped inside a big boiled sweet descends from the heavens and tells us that we’re long overdue a good rapture. This is mainly down to the six demon lords that have been busily ruining everything. The trapped Archon tells us that if we can deal with these six demons, then he’ll let the world keep on spinning. So we go off to do just that, quickly finding that the demons have embedded themselves in the top echelons of all the civilisations around us. So it’s time to play politics, in the bloodiest way possible.
It’s a decent enough framework for a plot, giving us an overarching goal and a big world to wander around in. There are also lots of things to kill in it. I’ll talk about the writing later, for now lets talk about hitting things. When we start a new game, we pick a class (between warrior and mage) and then a sub-speciality. So we could be a warrior that uses animals, or a mage that specialises in plagues. I went for a warrior who specialises in rage, because I wanted to hit things very hard. I was then shown expansive active and passive skill trees that catered to this, along with a more typical stats list. Oh and we get slightly demon-ified at one point, which allows for a specialised skill. I first began picking skills at random, but it quickly began to crystallise into actual tactics.
One clever trick of HellSlave II is that allows you to switch between skill and stat builds. That encourages experimentation, particularly if you’re a bit uncertain as to how you want to play it. The battle system is fairly clever too. It’s standard turn-based combat on the surface, but there’s a ‘fatigue’ system that essentially acts as a timer for your next move. So heavy hits will tire you out, and the enemy might be able to hit twice. Mastering that timer is the key to success, so I went for skills that allowed me to chain together quick hits. This built my rage, which I could then expend on heavy hits. It’s a clever idea and, crucially, I never grabbed a skill I didn’t use. Every skill had its place, and could be flexible. It’s great design.
Hell Is Other Demons
In fact, I like HellSlave II‘s design work in general. The art style is nice, with a grim hand-drawn style to things. The overworld feels quite nice and diverse, and I don’t think I saw a repeated enemy design. It was exciting walking to a new area and wondering what was going to burst out at me. While enemies are somewhat static in combat, you can instantly tell what sort of damage they’ll deal, which is great for prioritisation. The sound design is top notch too. When an enemy hits your shield, there’s an almost deafening clang, for instance. It makes combat feel like an action sequence, with all the different sounds popping off. The fantastic battle music helps too. In fact, it’s still echoing in my ears.
Outside of the combat though, HellSlave II is on slightly shakier ground. The world itself is quite nice, with a decent backstory. The race we play as, the Harogs, are the result of demon spawn mating with Archons. So we’re a race that wasn’t meant to exist, trying to justifying its existence. That’s great. The lore is a little sloppily told at times though, relying on a big text walls in an archive. The bigger problem, though, is the protagonist. They feel remarkably inconsistent. At one point they’re happily helping a historian map an ancient ruin for free, at other times they’re brutally extorting an innocent farmer after slaying a monster. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is quite awkwardly written. Our protagonist does fit well into the overall story structure, but it ends abruptly, with a choice that it doesn’t let us make.
HellSlave II is also a slave to the recurring issues of dungeon crawlers. Managing the inventory, for instance, is painful. I like that gear doesn’t just have basic stats, but instead relies on resistances to certain types of damage, or different offensive buffs. But this means that comparing gear takes longer as you try to slot it into your overall build, so every enemy vomiting up five or six different bits of gear becomes tedious. Being a dungeon crawler also doesn’t mesh well with the open world, as every area is sectioned by level and trying to explore often causes quests to fire in the wrong order. Like when I rescued a naked bloke from a cave, and my guy instantly knew he was a fisherman. Might have been the smell, I suppose.
HellSlave II – Thoroughly Absorbing
Usually these issues would cause me to grow bored of a dungeon crawler before the end. Not so with HellSlave II. That’s partly down to the excellent design, but it’s also very well balanced, at least for a rage warrior. Every time a boss spiked the difficulty, and wiped me out, I was able to sit down, switch up my gear a bit, and come up with a winning strategy. Crucially, switching things up is easy enough that it didn’t become frustrating. I’d get a few pieces of gear, or a new skill, that suggested a new strategy and I ran with it, getting stronger all the time. As a result, battles never felt tedious because I could feel myself getting stronger. I ended up playing it for entire days, completely losing track of the time.
It’s not a flawless game, most of which comes down to those genre specific issues. It might be smoother on mouse and keyboard, mind. I was stubbornly playing it with controller, and the controller support isn’t the best. There were also a few hiccups, like the time a trader’s concept art appeared instead of the actual art. But none of that seemed to impact the overall experience to me, nor did the missteps in the writing. HellSlave II‘s excellent combat, lovely art and stellar sound design will get its teeth in you, and it absolutely will not let go.
