The Dungeons of Koh-Lah'B: Two slimes aren't better than one

[Gizmog]

Oh lordy, here's a perfect example of how a bunch of good ideas can go bad all at once. This was a Random Collab game by Meowski and BMR. Collab, Koh-Lah'B, get it? It's about as clever as K'Hyurbi. I hate that kind of pun. There's no music or story to write about, so this is going to be a very short review.

Basically, you control BMR and Meowski's SlimeSalad avatars in a randomly generated aka roguelike dungeon. All of the maptiles are the same color which makes telling walls from floors at a glance difficult, landmarks impossible, and to add to the fun there's a rudimentary lighting system that covers most of the screen anyway. That makes navigating the maze a terrible chore, and since navigating the maze is 90% of the game you know you're in for a hard time.

The other 10% of the game is the battles. I mentioned before that there's no music, but learn from my mistake: There ARE sound effects in battle. The "Thud" of the fight command is relatively harmless, if not telegraphed by this kind of annoying hiss before and after it starts, but the magic sound effects pop out of nowhere and scared the hell out of me. BMR/Meowski implemented a neat system where you can equip any item in your on or off hand, meaning you can dual wield shields or axes or whatever you like, though you have to "Use" the item in the item window to switch the hand it's allowed to be equipped in. It's a nice concept, but in my time with the game the equipment didn't make much difference. Attacks did very little damage to my foes and very much damage to me no matter what I was wearing. Probably better to just run.

Being a roguelike, the equipment/treasure is scattered randomly through the dungeon. Annoyingly, there's only one textbox for this "You got treasure!" which never specifies what *KIND* of treasure you got. You have to check your inventory every time you pick something up and that's annoying.

They put a lot of work into the various systems, but none of it plays very well together. Overall, I would consider this the least compelling game I've played so far. Borrow the scripts from BMR and Meowski if they'll loan 'em to you, but don't bother playing this. It's just empty.