I’m happy to say that it’s been a great couple of weeks for new titles that I decided to try out. A few days ago I talked about how much fun I had with Minecraft Dungeons, and now I’m back to talk about Slayin’ 2, which is one of the more unique and addictive arcade style games I’ve played in awhile.

A sequel to Slayin’ – surprising, I know – you basically play from a set of characters you unlock through the story mode and take on what feels like an endless horde of enemies to make it to the boss. Defeat them and you move onto the next area. The game seems simple on its surface but there’s actually a lot to do here, and playing with a friend is fun but also requires just enough teamwork to make it interesting.

The gameplay itself is probably the most unique part of it to me. It kinda plays like a mobile game, which makes sense because the original is on mobile. Your character basically moves around the level, running into enemies with whatever their weapon is, and hitting that enemy from the front automatically damages them without you pressing a button. So you’re basically just ramming into everything. This all happens on 2 planes covering the foreground and background, which keeps the action busy and you can use the plane change function to also evade attacks. You’ll pick up temporary power ups in the way of speed boosts, defense boosts, invincibility, things like that. Treasure chests will drop from the sky at times and assuming you got a key to drop off a dead enemy, you’ll open it and see an explosion of coins and maybe some bread or cheese. And really, who doesn’t love a good bread or cheese snack from a treasure chest? Science and the type of binge drinking that leads to the midnight gas station sandwiches have taught us that small amounts of mold are actually good for your immune system. Back to the treasure though – the coins are important because you’ll have a lot of things to buy and upgrade.

So each character uses a different weapon. The knight has his sword and shield, the ninja has a variety of choices, the sorceress apparently really badly wants to be like Rose or Menat from Street Fighter and uses a magic orb, and so on. All of these can be switched out for other weapons available to each character, and they’re not just for damage upgrades but do all play differently. For example the knight’s basic sword has a typical slash for a special attack, however if you switch that out for a spiked mace, that slash becomes a hopping slam attack that if used after jumping, does a spinning ball attack thing. The sorceress’ wind orb can shoot a tornado, or the flame orb can create a rotating flame whip attack. So on one layer, you’ve got each character that plays differently from one another, and then on another layer, each character has a few weapons available to further deepen how you play. Each weapon can also be upgraded.

Everything in this costs coins, and to be totally honest you’re going to grind a lot of coins out to get everything. The town has not only weapons for purchase, but also you’ll want to rebuild all the available buildings, buy charms to further help in your adventure, research items to see just what they are and how they’ll help you unlock secret levels, and there’s a guy that looks a little like Gandalf the Purple who can increase your spark bar, which you use for your special attacks. I personally don’t think the coin grind is that bad, especially when the levels are so quick, but I do want to mention that you’re going to run out of money a lot since there’s so much to buy.

I personally don’t think the coin grind is that bad, especially when the levels are so quick, but I do want to mention that you’re going to run out of money a lot since there’s so much to buy.

The levels are all pretty bite-sized and cover a really wide variety of locales, like your typical forests and grasslands, volcanos, castles and whatnot. They all look beautiful and the whole game looks like it belongs on an SNES cartridge. I don’t really care for the art style of the characters, but that’s just a personal preference. The music is usually some JRPG style of epic synth music along with some electric guitar in the background. It sounds a little like it belongs in the 90s, and I think it’s endearing. The sound effects aren’t anything to write home about and the bloops and bleeps you occasionally hear sound almost like they should be on an atari game. Like they’re a really low resolution and I thought it was an odd choice.

The enemy variety is fun – the enemies vary from your basic slimes to bats, skeletons, zombies, enemy soldiers, and so on. The bosses vary in quality from big slimes, to a banshee, giant soldiers and magical creatures. The bosses range in difficult as you’d expect, with some having some trickier patterns than others and might take a couple tries to get through. At the same time, I actually found some of the waves of enemies to fight more difficult than the bosses themselves.

That’s when I reailzed something about this game: Just because it’s fast paced action doesn’t mean you have to run around like a crackhead. Once I made the effort to slow down and take my time going after each enemy without rushing, you learn to keep your combo score higher, you learn to collect more coins, then you’ll get to the boss with more health and will have a much better chance of beating them.

Aside from story mode, Arcade mode was probably the most boring of the entire package. It’s your basic character and weapon select screen, then off you go. The enemies this time are endless, though it follows the same format so you’ll battle through so many, fight a boss, then go to the next area where a shopkeeper is waiting mid-fight. I didn’t see that anything you did carried over to Story, so it’s essentially a survival mode more than anything.

2 player co-op is more of the same for either story or arcade mode, though I have to say that it’s best to get some sort of plan together before starting. Having each of you monitor a different plane won’t always work depending on what enemies are doing. I also learned the hard way that when your partner hits the boss and they blink, your attacks will pass right through them, and you’ll get hit instead. Letting a character die means that you can resurrect them by giving a chunk of your health. Great idea, but then you’ll both have to be more cautious or it’ll happen right away again.

So if you’re looking for some fun arcade action on a budget, Slayin’ 2 is definitely worth your time and will keep you busy. It can be played for long stretches or you can jump in for a few minutes and while it has the accessability of a mobile game, it’s also deep enough for a console game fan.