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A promising concept but falls flat in the execution | PC+Mobile (Cloud) - Devil Slot Machine

340 View2023-12-22

Devil Slot Machine

7.8

Pixel GraphicsTower DefenseStrategyDemonsRoguelikeDeckbuildingRogueliteSingleplayer

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✨Overview

Devil Slot Machine is an upcoming game that presents itself as a roguelike pinball tower defense game where your heart is at stake in a deadly game with demons. The unique twist involves using health as currency for upgrades, tower placement, and rerolls. A demo is currently available now on Steam, and the game is planned to release next year 2024.

⭐️Score: 3/10

Pocket Playfest: An Indie Celebration 2023 Winter Edition

In a recent hands-on exclusive experience this past weekend, I had the privilege of testing a handful of titles on TapTap's experimental cloud gaming service, setting the stage for this 16-day event where indie game developers show-off their creations exclusively on the TapTap mobile platform — fully playable PC games without the need for an actual PC, Android/iOS version, or the need to download the games and install them. Granted, you’d need to have a reliable internet service to be able to stream these games, and preferably are located in US and Canada for consistent play and latency, at least for now.

🔗Join the Playfest >>

https://www.taptap.io/events/playfest2023winter

📅 Schedule
Dates: December 23, 12 AM PT - January 7, 11:59 PM PT.
Playfest Winners & Player Rewards Announcement: January 8, 12 AM PT.

For my personal cloud gaming experience in this specific, please see further below in the review.

📖Premise

The premise is that your heart is somehow strapped to a Slot Machine/Pinball Hybrid possessed by a Devil, and you must keep playing the game, or the devil will kill you. That’s about it, and I’m not even entirely sure, as I’m just guessing based on what I’m seeing.

🎨Graphics and Art Style

The retro dark pixel art style attempts to evoke nostalgia from the NES / Family Computer era, and it does, reminding me of games like Tetris, but it comes off as more of a lazy attempt at aesthetics. The soundtrack is also retro in its 8-bit music, adds to the nostalgic value, but not nothing really special.

🎮Gameplay

Devil Slot Machine is a mix of pinball, rogue-lite, and casino gambling gameplay. Demons rush to fall down the playfield , bouncing around towers Pinball style, and you have to strategically upgrade the towers along the way and shoot cards upwards to stop them from falling. For every demon that passes through, you lose one Health.

Health is everything, it is your currency too; used for upgrades, tower placement, and rerolls. There are resource management aspects as well, as you’d have to balance your HP over buying upgrades and placing towers across the Playfield. You have a character on the bottom of the playfield shooting cards upwards, in the hopes of helping to stop the onslaught of falling demons.

The Demo's tutorial does a poor job of explaining mechanics, leaving players to stumble through matches with little understanding. I had no clue for my first two matches and had to brute force learning it by reading the poorly translated tooltips. The English localization is poorly made, so it only adds to the confusion about the mechanics and how cards work.

The pacing is horrendously slow, with unskippable animations and the pointless ringing of the bell TWICE to end/start a turn being annoying (There should at least be a visual cue to the player). The only thing you can skip in this demo are the dialogues, and even that is done very poorly; you skip straight to the next line instead of skipping the ultra-slow crawl of text — another annoying aspect. The unskippable animations and slow pacing overall compound the issue, making the overall experience feel tedious and needlessly convoluted.

As for it’s mechanics, I found that the game is simply poorly balanced; my experience is that it relies a lot on RNG more than anything, more than your skill to move the character around to shoot cards, or more than your tactics to strategically buy and place towers.

🕹Controls

Out of all the possible buttons they could have used to move the character around to shoot cards, they actually decided to choose mouse movement, which is by far the worst kind and doesn’t give precision to the player, instead of let’s say, the arrow keys. Other aspects are the point-and-click mechanics for upgrading shops, placing towers, or rerolling.

📊Technical Performance

I don’t know if this was a feature I accidentally stumbled upon or a bug, but my progression in the demo was constantly giving me zero lives to start any run. I could not buy anything, but I could not die either. I just sat back and watched the game play itself without me doing anything aside from clicking the ball. Restarting, or reinstalling the game did not fix the issue.

⚖️Conclusion

Overall, Devil Slot Machine is a gambling rogue-lite that is confusing, annoyingly slow, and relies too much on RNG with not much element of skill. I don't know the target market for this, if it even exists, but I’m sure as hell not part of it. The promising concept falls flat in the execution, turning what could be an engaging experience into a frustrating ordeal.

☁️General Cloud Gaming Experience

This past weekend, I had the chance to be chosen as one of the testers for an experimental cloud gaming service by TapTap, and I must say, it holds a lot of promise. The quality is seriously impressive - we're talking sharp HD resolution, not like your typical streamed game. Looks and feels native and doesn’t feel like its streamed. The performance is also smooth (60FPS), with good frame timing (by visual observation only, as there was no tool to monitor this). There’s currently no way to play at a native 16:9 with black bars, as the screen is stretched out to the phone’s screen.

📶Cloud Latency

In my experience, my latency during the test phase was around 200ms --- only because the servers are currently located in United States for now and I'm connecting from asia. Even then, It’s still a bit playable, especially for games that are not latency sensitive like point and click games or those with simple controls. Having said that, it’s just a matter of server location and having lots of servers. It’s understandable since this is just a testing phase with limited servers. If a datacenter is nearby, I am positive that I’ll have a smooth and fluid experience, same with those living in the US or Canada. It works like a charm on 5GHz wifi, but the experience took a hit on 2.4GHz, so won’t recommend that.

🕹Cloud Touch Controls

Now, onto the user interface. I'm a fan of how each game has its own custom on-screen buttons, tailored to the specific control scheme. It works like a charm for simpler games, but things get a bit tricky with more complex ones.

🔃Cloud Accessibility

Accessing the service is a breeze - the Instant Play integration is right there on the game page, next to Download/Steam/Play buttons. Loading times are impressively fast, and I love that I can minimize the TapTap app and return to the game still streaming. Progress is not yet saved between streaming sessions, so it’s clearly just for testing purposes. Overall, it's been an interesting experience, and while there are some kinks, the potential here is exciting. Definitely surpassed my expectations.

🌩Specific Cloud Game Experience

Devil Slot Machine offers a fully playable experience with a native feel for point-and-click interactions. Tower placement feels natural, and everything is controlled using point-and-click touch controls. The game relies almost entirely on point-and-click interactions; however, I did encounter some difficulties when controlling the character firing the cards at the bottom or displaying tooltips/stats for the different towers.