Bring your friends…or else
SlashDash first grabbed my attention at PAX East, where it easily soaked up a good amount of my time on the show floor. Also, I’m pretty sure Dylan Sprouse was working the booth. Or maybe it was Cole? I guess it could have been both, like the Parent Trap.
Anyway, I didn’t pay much attention to Mr. Sprouse since SlashDash was way too intense to look away, even for a moment. It’s a game of teamwork, quick thinking, and mind games. Just make sure you bring four people to play it.
SlashDash (Xbox One)
Developer: Nevernaut Games
Publisher: Nevernaut Games
MSRP: $9.99
Released: July 17, 2015
SlashDash is a local-multiplayer only game. There is no one-player mode, no bots, no challenges, nothing. If there are not at least two players, it’s impossible to play any mode. I just wanted to make that perfectly clear before anyone reads further.
It uses a simple control scheme, but that doesn’t make it a simple game. Players can slash with their sword, perform a small teleport forward, or throw a weapon forward. Hitting an enemy with a thrown weapon like a kunai will stun them for a brief moment of time, but slashing them will kill them, forcing them to respawn. It takes less than a single round of play for players to fully comprehend the controls, but the feeling of mastery is still a long ways off.
The biggest quirk is that players cannot slash and move at the same time. It may sound like a non-issue, but in a fast-paced game like SlashDash, it makes a world of difference. It forces players to really think about their attacks, because a single missed attack might be the difference between victory and defeat. Everyone moves at the same default speed, so missing an attack and stopping is a huge setback.
There are four modes available: Capture the Flag, Assassination, Deathrace, and Mirror Match. Capture the Flag (CTF) is easily the best mode available. It doesn’t deviate far from what players would expect from a CTF variant. It’s 2v2 only, and one player must grab the opponent’s flag and return it to their base to score a point. The player carrying the flag is slowed, but their teammate can slash them and give them an extra boost of speed. It’s incredibly important to master this skill, and forces players to think about what move would be better: boosting your flag carrier, defending them, or attacking the opponent who has your flag.
Other than simply outplaying an opponent, mind games are a huge part of CTF. There’s a deceivingly large amount of options at any given time, regardless of which role a player is filling. Of course, all of this happening with friends nearby or on the same couch is what really pumps the excitement into SlashDash.
Assassination gives each team a Shogun to protect. The Shogun will blindly follow one player, and slashing your own Shogun will make it run to your teammate. It’s important to know that the Shogun will run in a straight line to your teammate, and will get caught on any pieces of environment that are in the way. It’s hard to find a good Shogun these days.
The Shogun variant is interesting, but doesn’t tend to provide the same amount of excitement as CTF. Having the Shogun generally forces the player to run away, and these matches can easily devolve into very defensive matches from both teams.
Deathrace is a fancy way to say Deathmatch, with a slight twist on the formula. This is a free-for-all mode where each player has a bar that fills as long as they are alive. If a player is stunned or killed, the bar is slowed. The first player to fill their bar wins. The leader has a ring around them to indicate they are in first, but it’s really hard to see by how much. The bar that fills for each player is a circle in the middle of the stage, and makes it near-impossible to see how close players are to one another.
Mirror Match is the worst of the bunch. In this mode, every player gets five ninjas to control, each acting at the same time. It’s possible to separate them by using the environment, but this mode is basically just chaos. There wouldn’t be much wrong with this, except that the frame rate drops heavily while playing, even with just two people. I’ve even had the game crash on me on this mode. If it didn’t struggle to run, Mirror Match could be a chaotic distraction from the other modes, but as it stands, it is unplayable.
There are nine maps, and each of them are quite unique from one another. One map is made of ice with less friction, while another has spikes that rise from the ground that will kill anyone who steps on them. Map knowledge is an important skill, since it is crucial to know what the ninjas can and cannot teleport over. Being chased by an opponent and failing to teleport over a gap because it was too far can lead to some quick deaths.
New throwing weapons can be unlocked, seemingly through games played. This is never made very clear, but considering all I have done is play matches, I think it’s safe to say that playing more matches unlocks more throwing weapons. It’s a shame, though, because there will be people who download the game to play with friends and only have a single throwing weapon, the Kunai, to use. It takes some decent playtime to unlock them, too, which seems counter-intuitive to the design of the game as a whole.
The different weapons all have very different effects, and cater to multiple different playstyles. The smoke bomb, for example, creates a big puff of smoke around the ninja, making them impossible to see for a moment (warning: do NOT use in Mirror Match, for the love of frame rate). The Poison Kunai, on the other hand, stuns for a very small amount of time, but prevents the enemy from teleporting for a short time instead. Playing around with the throwing weapons is a blast, once they’re all unlocked.
One huge issue is the rematch button. Opting to rematch restarts the match, but every player is reverted back to the Kunai for a throwing weapon, regardless of what they picked. Originally this is fine, since it’s the only weapon unlocked, but as people start to select different weapons, the button becomes useless.
Despite incredibly polished visuals with a true homage to Japanese culture, there’s a ton of gameplay hiccups, After playing a game and going back to the main menu, the “Instructions” option becomes invisible. It’s still there, just invisible until the player selects it. Selecting rematch after “Random” is chosen for the stage brings players to the same level, instead of a new random one. I’ve encountered freezes multiple times, even outside of Mirror Match. And after a match, the options for rematch, mode select, and stage select can block a player’s statistics if they accidentally hit a button too early, which is common when the end of a match is intense.
I really do love SlashDash, but only when playing with four people. Currently, there’s a lot of blemishes on the product as a whole, most of which seem like glaring oversights. There’s also not a lot going on for people who don’t regularly have friends over at their house to play multiplayer games. With no single-player and even lackluster two-player options, SlashDash exists for a certain kind of player. Hopefully all of the bugs can be fixed, because playing Capture the Flag with three friends is easily one of the best local multiplayer experiences out there.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
