There are dark places in the world inhabited by evil denizens. Places filled with danger and foreboding where no ordinary man would dare to journey. However, there are a few who are willing to risk death in the name of good, in the name of justice, in the name of.. valuable loot! Hack, Slash, Loot(HSL) is a single-player turn-based dungeon crawler for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Take control of a lone hero and explore sprawling dungeons, fight dangerous monsters, and most importantly, plunder valuable treasures. HSL features thousands of items, monsters, and dungeon features, and with a new dungeon created every game you can be sure that no two plays will ever be the same. Boasting easy to master controls you'll be adventuring in no time, but there is still enough depth to challenge the most hardened of adventurers.
First, let me be clear that I got this game when I bought an IndieRoyale bundle for some of the other games in it. I'm not "butthurt" because I wasted my money. That aside, let's review.
I mostly like to explore but I'm also generally OK with well-balanced roguelikes which lack an exploration mode... but this is neither. I've never gotten past the first few rooms without dying.
...which brings me to the next problem. The documentation is terrible. The built-in "online help" button doesn't work and the "how to play" link on the website is pretty much just a glorified keyboard reference and overview of what the different in-game icons mean... plus a link saying "see forums for more help". (I was looking for the apparently nonexistant "regain health so you can survive beyond the third room" mechanic)
When installed on Linux, it's installed non-executable, so Desura silently fails to start it unless you go into the install directory and explicitly set the binary as executable.
The game claims to default to using ALSA, but I use ALSA dmix for my audio support (PulseAudio is too buggy) and, out of 75 games and at least a dozen more applications, only Voxatron joins it in silence.
The keyboard interface is poor. Even reading the reference and experimenting, I couldn't figure out how to preview a dropped piece of equipment. I will admit that the mouse interface is very nicely polished, but that's overshadowed by the other flaws.
For example, there's no inventory, so I can't save items for later without leaving them lying on the ground and, according to the forums, you have to do that AND avoid killing some of the monsters if you want to have enough health to survive the later levels.
If you want a nice, simplified roguelike which is available on all platforms, download Brogue (free, textual but uses unicode and colors beautifully). If you want a fun, graphical rogue-like which is available on all platforms, buy Dungeons of Dredmor.