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Slime 3K: Rise Against Despot Review

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Slime 3K: Rise Against Despot Screenshot

A fun Bullet Heaven game in the Despot Universe. It can feel a bit grindy but is in early access, so I hope later on it feels less grindy and more overpowered. It has no missable achievements and takes around 15h to 100%.

Steam

This game is in Early Access, so the info below will probably change over time, but hopefully it gives a good idea.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: At this moment with 65 achievements it takes around 15h.
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: Many, as it is a roguelite
Is there a good guide available: Not yet
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, but at this moment the game feels, in general, a bit grindy to make progress.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Slime 3K is a great Bullet Heaven type of game in the universe of the Despot games. You play as a slime who will attack the humans that try to defeat you, so you will level up as much as possible before the end boss shows up. At the top of the screen, you’ll see the timer until the boss shows up.

The first 2 levels out of 10 felt easy, not much of a struggle and a good way to learn about the real mechanic of the game, inventory management. Which skills will you have in the active bar, and do you have enough room to upgrade those? You need 3 x the skills of the same level to upgrade it, with a maximum of level 3. So to go from level 1 to level 2, you need to have 3 times the level 1 in your inventory and it will automatically upgrade to level 2, but for level 3 you need 3 times the level 2 in your inventory.

The moment you kill the boss the levels ends directly. You hopefully got many upgrade items to buy new meta progression, but also how more you kill, the more experience which is used to unlock new skills. Before each run, you can make a deck of which skills you want to show up in the run. There is one basic deck you start with, and there are 4 slots to make your own deck. And more meta progression skills unlock by doing specific things in a run, like for example having 3 skills active with the “fire” trait.

I enjoyed the game a lot, and it might be balanced out, but it sometimes felt not rewarding to finish a run, especially when you weren’t able to kill the end boss yet. When you didn’t earned enough experience for a new skills, and haven’t enough tokens to unlock permanent meta progression, it isn’t for nothing but it can feel that way, especially if it happens a few times in a row. I wondering if it would feel more rewarding if there were also sidequests of some sort, to earn more tokens toward the meta progression, and experience. That way you can focus on those if you need to grind for the next upgrade, but it also gives you something extra to do. Or maybe give an in-game reward when unlocking an achievement to earn some tokens/experience that way.

I needed to let go of early skills in a run because the newer ones you unlock later on don’t look that much better, but it seems they really are. So you need to take a risk with selling a skill you got early on, in order to make space in your inventory and get stronger overall.

Slime 3K has fun achievements. It has the basic ones for completing each level, and kill X amount of enemies of type Z. Next to that is has achievements for a lot of the skills to get them to level 3. The deck-building option before a run can help you out working toward those.

I had a lot of fun with Slime 3K, but wish it would feel a bit more rewarding/overpowered while playing it. I have high hopes this will change while the game is still in early access as the developer and publisher are active on the Steam forums and address things that get brought up by players.

Publisher:
TinyBuild Logo

Developer:
Konfa Games Logo

This review for Slime 3K: Rise Against Despot was written on 10 November 2023, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 65 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.

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