Hack 'n' Slash
Skip · Narrative · 2014
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $13.37.
- Length
- 4.5h
- Value
- $2.97/hr
- Reviews
- 53% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 3 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Hack ‘n’ Slash is a puzzle action game about hacking -- reprogram object properties, hijack global variables, hack creature behavior, and even rewrite the game’s code. The only way to win is not to play...by the rules!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.33. That was November 2015. It has been discounted 65 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
It is pricier than 75 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 99 percent. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Broken Age ($14.99, scores 42) and Trine Enchanted Edition ($14.99, scores 78) both outscore it.
Critics scored it 73, but players land 20 points lower at 53 percent. The reviews were kinder than the room.
Inside the two-hour refund window, 33 percent of the 120 reviews written there were positive, against 53 percent overall, and those are 22 percent of everything written about it.
At 4.5 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
What players say
Not a bad concept for a game... only really works for people interested in coding/videogame development, and I'm here for that.... but the current iteration feels more like a tech demo to me than a fully finished game.
i played this a while ago so my memory is hazy, but i remember enjoying it. puzzle solutions can be obtuse at times, but i think that made it more endearing. making the jump from just editing variables to editing entire chunks of the game's code (even if it was just swapping out operations) was really cool to me. doesn't deserve 58% positive reviews imo, its better than that
For a game centering around coding concepts, they certainly skipped the debugging part. This game tries to have a plan in place if you do something that break code, by returning you to the beginning of a room. However, there are many times where a plan is not in place and the game softlocks and even hardlocks you, forcing you to quit out of the game entirely. These ranged from enemy interactions freezing the game...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Hack 'n' Slash scores 0/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/246070/hack-n-slashThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.