Slime Hunter: Wild Impact Review

Big Numbers, Bigger Repetition

Slime Hunter: Wild Impact, published by GAMEVIL, is a 2D RPG that weaves many mechanics from popular PC titles into a jam-packed package flawed by heavy repetition, cluttered UI, microtransactions and either overly long or pointless quests. If you can push through these flaws, there are some good things the game does well to keep you busy.

Game Breaking Combat

The games power fantasy is established once you choose your class. You defeat the tutorial boss with powerful end game skills that have no cooldown with each hit causing massive numbers to pop up, showing just how powerful you can become. Once you complete the tutorial you will start with beginner skills and gear. Plenty of bonus items are given out which are strong enough for most of the campaign.

The overall game is either talking to NPC’s, fighting up to 150 enemies, or fetch quests that involve defeating monsters. With the option of manual or auto-combat, you learn early on that just letting the game play itself is the best option. During combat you jump around the menus leveling your gear by hand. You can have AI controlled companions to help you fight but the combat loop still remains. As you progress, your character gets more powerful, and the battle numbers get bigger but the frames heavily drop, which can lead to the game crashing multiple times.

Once all your free upgrade materials run out, you find your power fantasy come to an end. You’ll eventually reach a point where your level of power progress becomes smaller due to the difficulty of getting upgrade materials. Towards the end of the story many enemies will defeat you even at lower levels.

Cute World, Skippable Story

Slime Hunter’s graphics and world design will give you vibes of the popular PC and mobile RPG Maple Story, a flair between pixel art and standard line art that flows well together. The games many biomes are aesthetically unique compared to the others. From a fantasy forest to fighting in the clouds of a mysterious god-like civilization. Attack animations from your skills are flashy and well designed as you strike down the games many colorful monsters. These monsters can be collected by players and used as pets, which boosts your core stats.

The story has some interesting ideas of fusing the past and future while a mystical force threatens the world. Unfortunately, these ideas are drowned out by many story quests that are just repetitive  fetch or kill quests. At times, the story will level gate you causing what feels like endless grinding. If you complete the story, there are plenty of end game activities which break the monotony of the main story.

Slow Progression

The monetization in Slime Hunter: Wild Impact becomes more of a push as you progress through the game. Early on, the rewards and gifts you collect give the player plenty of incentive to continue playing. This keeps the flow of progression high, with the occasional pop-up asking money for items. However, once the free materials go away, you’ll feel more enticed to make purchases to build progression. This issue can instantly defeat the fun of the game.

Overall, Slime Hunter was an ambitious idea that got some of its core RPG mechanics correct. Still, after a few hours, the fun lost its luster due to poor design choices and long uninteresting quests. If GAMEVIL goes back and fixes its issues this game could becoming a solid contender to the 2D RPG competition. The art, character costumes and monsters are fun and creative but it doesn’t hold up to the rest of the package which is not enough incentive to have me coming back for more.