Just thought I'd add a slayer review/opinion to the mix.
After reading a few negative comments about Slayer, I had decided not to buy it. But while I was at the mall the other night, I figured, "What the hell."
I got it home and didn't really feel like reading all of those instructions, so I just popped it in, looked at the intro, then played one of the prerolled fighters for a few minutes. I thought it was ok, but nothing too impressive (I've played a decent bit of Doom); so since I didn't have a lot of time, I loaded up Road Rash to beat that level 4 Sierra track. I love that game... anyway.
Sunday afternoon, I sat down long enough to read a little about the character races and classes. It's pretty standard AD&D stuff, but I always enjoy reading the implementation specifics anyway.
Character generation is pretty simple. I have one problem with it, though. It's too configurable. Besides the typical settings that you can play with: race, alignment, class, you can also change individual attribute scores. There's no limit to this feature, so you can give yourself all 18's. Too tempting in my book, but I reasonably restrained myself. I decided that rather than sit there hitting the reroll button all day to get a good randomly rolled character, I'd take one of the first ones that came along then give myself 4 points to play with.
So, I ended up with a human magic user with decent but not great stats. On to the game...
The looks: The game looks pretty good. ObDoomComparison, I like the 'grain' of the textures better in Slayer, but Doom uses a better color scheme. The floors and the ceilings look nice, though, and I do like being able to look down into lava pits every once in a while. I think that some contrasts could have come out better. Sometimes it's difficult to see things lying on the floor, or what those items on the floor are. Of course, I'm playing on a fairly small television set, so that could be the problem.
The music: Uh, could have been better. You get new interesting music every level, but the same interesting segment is short and played over and over and over and over.
The controls: The movement's nice. Casting spells is done though a reasonably quick popup menu interface. My only complaint is that the minimum number of degrees that you can turn seems a little high. I find myself oscillating back and forth a lot, trying to aim precisely at some poor monster for a long Magic Missile.
The storyline: Well, there really isn't one. Your only real mission is to stay alive. I would have enjoyed 'reassembling the great amulet' or 'destroying the evil wizard Werdna', but there's none of that here.
The game play: Overall, I'm really enjoying it. I have some complaints, but nothing that really hurts my enjoyment or my willingness to keep playing. I thought that I was really taking a chance when I bought it, but now I'm very glad that I did. If you like first person perspective shooters and rpg's, you'll probably like this combination of the two. It will be really interesting to see the next effort from these guys if they add in a few things that I'd like to see, like:
The above public service announcement was definitely IMFHO, enjoy,
michel.buffa@cmu.edu