Slash and Roll, Become the Dice Assassin – Review

What do you get when you mix an action-packed rogue-like with dice, cards and the turn-based mechanics of chess? Well, you get Dice Assassin, naturally.

You may think I am being satirical, but Dice Assassin actually combines all these mechanics. Better still, it combines them well. There is no story and no characters to sink your teeth into. All you have is your assassin and the quest to trudge your way through floor after floor of monsters, but do you have the skills to survive?

Dice Assassin is equal parts luck and strategy. Each turn you roll to determine what your range (movement) and damage values are. You then chose where on the board/map you would like to move to while trying to avoid the red highlighted squares which indicate enemy movements. While some enemies move on a diagonal line, you are stuck to the horizontal and vertical lines.

To start with, you only have the slash move which allows you to move and attack in the same turn. If you travel through enemies with this weapon, you will also damage them to the sum of your damage dice, but beware, they can do this to you too. Later weapons add range variations and area of effects, but you still have to purchase their cards to unlock them.

You can also use cards to enact different effects. Some cards deal damage, others give you health and money. How and when you use these cards can really change the tide of battle, but they do cost a pretty penny.

Enemies have different ranges and movement speeds, keeping you on your toes as you delve deeper into the dungeon. Dice Assassin also adds in new enemies after you defeat each boss and unlock new weapons to put into the card pool. There were some fun mechanics between the enemies and bosses. It’s not easy to change things up when working with a grid map, but I felt like they kept things reasonably fresh and I didn’t feel any monster fatigue.

At first, I found Dice Assassin super difficult to progress in, but once I got the hang of pulling back my character to line the enemies up for multiple KO’s, I really started to get into it. The pixelated graphics are deceptively crisp and fuse the various gameplay elements together well. Similarly, the music has a retro-electro vibe to the scores which encouraged my hyper-focus and kept me engaged.

I can’t speak to how many levels there are since I was unable to “git gud” enough to defeat the third boss, but the collection display teases a fair few unlockable cards I have yet to attain. I also like that the pause menu highlights your next goal to give you a reasonable target besides defeating the entire game.