20/10 best DMC game, there is now Vergil DLC so this game is perfect

Hack, Slash, Loot is a game that I got as part of a bundle, that I dearly wish had never been redeemed. Its presence, forever a taint on my library.

Avoid this game, for this game is precision crafted to avoid literally everything good about roguelikes ever. Hack, Slash, Loot is such a bad roguelike that it can be considered the anti-roguelike, the embodiment of all the bad parts of roguelikes with none of the good whatsoever.

The game lacks any sort of mechanical depth whatsoever. Everything boils down to boring, static numbers. Where a better roguelike would have classes that play differently, different skills perhaps, equipment preferences and the like, the ability to use magic perhaps, this game has none of those things. And I'm not saying that a roguelike has to have those things, you understand. I'm saying that most fantasy roguelikes would have those things, for instance Dungeons of Dredmor and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Even within the "Roguelite" games, you'd have characters with a vastly different playstyle resulting from different skillsets, stats and starting equipment, like in The Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain, Nuclear Throne, Ziggurat, the list goes on.

Hack, Slash, Loot instead has classes that boil down to melee and ranged, no resting to regain your health, no skills, no mana. Your character is simply a walking sheet of stats, bolstered by your equipment that are nothing but stats. This creates no interesting gameplay choices, either you find something that has better stats than your current equipment, or you don't. There is no strategy, there is no way to build your character, there is no game to be enjoyed here.

This creates a game that is nothing but dice rolls upon dice rolls, with little to no player input involved. There is no feeling of accomplishment if you get further than you previously did, there is no anguish when you die. You cannot self reflect on a defeat that was entirely out of your control, you cannot ask yourself what you could've done better.

The beauty of a roguelike is its nigh infinite replayability, the ways you can experiment with builds, the magic of discovery as you find something that works, figure out the tricks of the game, and get further everytime. The excitement when you turn a bad run around after an item that perfectly synergizes with your current character appears, or the opposite, where you make it far, even perhaps to the final level, before dying. Lamenting that you would've won if you had the right items. And what about the times when you pull through a bad run? That is the core of the roguelike experience that Hack, Slash, Loot ultimately fails to capture.

In conclusion, Hack, Slash, Loot is a thoroughly incompetent roguelike that tries to distill the experience, but what you instead get is a shallow game with no identity, no soul. It is a bad game, it is a bad roguelike, and you should avoid it like the plague.

Yeah it's good.