Heart&Slash is a game that might fill that Mega Man Legends shaped hole in your heart. It’s a colorful 3D brawler that is set in a world ruled by machines. It’s now available in an early form on Steam Early Access.
As the innocent robot Heart, you fight through machine-laden rooms of combat robots in order to escape the clutches of the nefarious, all-seeing machine QuAsSy (Quality Assurance Systems).
There are three different worlds to slash, combo, and leap around, across which are several different weapons and over a hundred different body parts to swap around. Each of these give you different abilities to use in combat, including teleportation, stopping time, flying around with a jetpack, and wall-jumping.
Inspired by roguelikes, Heart&Slash has permadeath but has a persistent progression system that gives you more options as you play the game. That said, the levels are procedurally generated each time you start a new game, and you’ll find new weapons and body parts to exchange each time.
Heart&Slash started as a part-time solo project and, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, has grown into a much larger game. A very early version of the game is still available to download for free on Game Jolt.
This Early Access version has more features implemented into it, and while it is still in development, the team behind Heart&Slash hope to release it by December 2014, so it isn’t too far off from its release build. It’s available for $24.99 (discounted at $22.49) for Windows and Mac on Steam.
