One of the shames with quite a number of games I’ve played over the years, is titles that have some great ideas and ambition that work well in one aspect, but are then taken down by another. Granted, depending on the area that’s under-developed, and how essential it is to the core play experience, some weaknesses are more crippling than others. Where it gets to be a pity is when it’s the fundamentals that let the experience down, making it hard for the bright spots to shine when you’re regularly reminded of the elements that aren’t working so well. In my mind that’s the issue with Slime Heroes, which has some ideas that I think are exciting, but that simply struggles to play well on a general level.

Slime Heroes is a bit of an odd game of contrasts. While you could see its gameplay and think it would be a more light-hearted affair, don’t let your cute and slimy hero fool you. While perhaps not intentionally this, can be a challenging adventure at times. Conceptually, one of the keys to help you in your success, would be its magic system that allows you to combine different spells together, assigning a secondary spell to one of your primary ones, making for a more powerful punch in theory. While I’ll admit that the further you go, and the more spells you then have at your disposal to combine, I’d argue it takes some time to see anything remotely potent. If anything, early experiments tended to result in inconsistent or even functionally useless combinations. Sometimes they could look flashy, but in practice I tended to get better results with them on their own.

What really lets the game down is the general execution of the combat in the end, which is something central to pretty well the entire experience, so its weakness is thoroughly felt. The thing is, there’s no specific aspect that is off, it’s more of a combination of multiple factors that holds it back. There are issues with the general feel of the controls and your actions being a little loose, something that’s exacerbated by the 3D view and camera, and then the spell combinations which mostly feel like a novelty rather than useful. Down the stretch you’ll find some combos you’ll likely enjoy, but rather than feeling like this system opens the door to a wide variety of possibilities and tactics, it seems to simply reveal a small handful of actual useful ones, greatly diminishing the potential of the whole thing. You could argue the combat can be challenging, and perhaps enjoy that aspect, but for me whatever difficulty that is there tends to be built on sloppy execution, so I’m not convinced that’s the best foot to put forward.

Putting it all together, if you don’t mind its somewhat middling looks and execution, perhaps you could find enough here to have fun with it. I’ve certainly played worse games on the eShop in this general vein, but I’d argue there are more than enough better ones that it ends up being pretty far down the list. Perhaps if all of its ideas had been better implemented, and opened the door to more exciting possibilities, there could have been more to salvage the experience, but as is it’s just not terribly compelling.