Rack and Slay Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Roguelikes are a pretty diverse bunch, even if there’s a glut of action RPGs and deckbuilders in the form, but using billiards as inspiration stands out as particularly unique, introducing some entertaining ideas. In Rack and Slay, you navigate a dungeon as a billiard ball, encountering treasures, traps, enemies, and various power-ups along the way.

There’s no deep storytelling in Rack and Slay, the game firmly set in the casual, pickup and play category. The controls will be familiar to anyone who has played a pool or snooker game before – you aim where you want the ball to go and then power up the shot, releasing the ball to hopefully do what you want – but this is not your standard game of billiards.

For one thing, pockets are located in random places, sometimes the traditional corners, and sometimes in the middle of the table, and they can be different sizes. For another, there’s other hazards to watch out for, with wall spikes, bombs, bear traps, and portals all posing a risk to your billiard ball. Your billiard ball has a health bar too, with any unwanted impact doing a point damage.

The aim is to pot all of the enemy balls within a set number of shots and without incurring too much damage. If you run out of shots, each of the remaining enemy balls does a point of damage to you. If you do not have enough health points, then your run is over. If you do survive this final attack, you will move onto the next dungeon with your reduced health.

Rack and Slay is a roguelike though, and with that comes upgrades and abilities. Between each dungeon you will be able to select random ability cards, as well as use any gold you have collected to recover health, increase your shot power, increase the number of shots you have per level, and add more abilities. These abilities include being able shoot out mini billiard balls when you launch the main ball, become invulnerable to traps, gain health and gold, and increase shot power. There are dozens of ability cards to unlock, and