Slayer is a single player first person perspective RPG that can randomly generate dungeons.Cp I've been playing with Slayer for several hours now, and on the whole it's better than I expected. The CD comes in a jewel box, but the manual is oversized. The manual is very comprehensive (probably too much so), and when creating your character you get all of the things you've come to expect from SSI's RPG's. A multitude of races and classes are possible, including multi-class characters, all the normal character atributes are there and so on.
I was a little weary of Slayer because I tend to enjoy RPG's where there are multiple character parties and complex magic systems (e.g. DungeonMaster), and Slayer has neither of these. There is one character in the party and the magic system isn't very complex. What's winning me over right know though is the first person 3-D engine on this thing. Its simply amazing. Motion is very fluid, lighting works correctly (e.g. flickering torches), The maps are very complex with multi level rooms, the player can look up and down, shuffle right or left, and even crawl if he has to. There are real ceilings and floors, everything is beautifully texture mapped. Combat is pretty straightforward so far, but my character hasn't progrssed far. All in all I think I'll be playing this one for a while.
First off it's much smoother than Doom running on my 486 box (66MHZ - so I do play doom on a very high end machine). It's much faster at during anything and everything is more fluid. I mean here's a game where I can permanenty change my viewing angle so that my head is pointed towards the ceiling, it's cool. One of the reasons that Doom was better than wolf3d was because they used better colors and created a better atmosphere. Slayer creates quite an atmosphere, and the colors are terrific. (The music is also very, very good and adds a great deal to the game). There is the same pixelattion effect that Doom has but its mostly limited to the monsters strangely enough. The walls look seriously anti-aliased at any distance. (btw. there is a great two level auto-mapping system). On the whole I think the graphics are definitely doom level, although the cartoony look of some of the monsters (theres a giant mushroom head for example) isn't as good as most of dooms (rather limited selection of) baddies. I've spent more time staring at things here than I did when I first got Doom, so... I think the ability to have the perspective shift up and down, the multi-level rooms (I just walked out over a grating to get to a door, and could look down into the room below), the crawling, the windows and the sheer speed are all things that ID should put in the doom engine.
Which isn't to say that there couldn't be some improvements. The pictures you choose between for your character are cartoony they should probably be digitized pictures. The magic system should be more complicated and I still want multi-character parties.
Overall, the game looks great, I'm sure that this will serve nicely for the time being in filling the first-person 3D niche. I'm also surprised at how much play value there is, I'm thinking a lot more than I do when I play Doom, and the range of items is good, although nowhere near as impressive as say nethack or larn. Doom seems to have many more secrets than Slayer, but I'll probably come back to this more. I'll also point out that this would be nigh perfect if there was some form of modem play available. This is one area where I feel the Jag people are defintely right, it would greatly enhance play to have multiple people in my dungeon.
michel.buffa@cmu.edu