Slice & Dice review
:: PARTY PARLAYPrice: Free
Version: 3.0.9
App Reviewed on: iPhone SE
Graphics/Sound Rating:
User Interface Rating:
Gameplay Rating:
Replay Value Rating:
Overall Rating:
There is no shortage of roguelikes on mobile, and great ones at that. I feel like I'm writing about some new hotness in this space every other month. It's a pace that feels unsustainable, and yet, the hits keep coming. Slice & Dice is yet another incredible run-based dungeon-crawler that is more than capable of standing out in front of its excellent competition.
Rolling deep
In Slice & Dice, you "control" a party of adventurers as they battle their way through a set of increasingly challenging combat encounters. You do this by rolling dice for your team and choosing to lock in specific abilities before using them to deal damage, buff your team, etc. Each of your party members has unique sides on their individual die that is determined by their particular class and the items you have equipped on them.
After each battle, your party gets stronger through gaining a choice of item or a somewhat random offer to evolve one of your heroes' classes. Through these layers of chance, you are supposed to try and create some degree of order that allows you continue to survive fights and forge on. But, if you don't, there's always next time, and chances are good your next run will have some new unlockable to play with.
Variable variety
It may seem like Slice & Dice is a total crapshoot given how chance-based every facet of its gameplay is, but if that was the case I probably would have stopped playing it well before writing this review. There's some design magic at work here that I can't quite put my finger on, but you never feel totally out of control or unable to right the ship on any given run of Slice & Dice. At the same time, you always feel like you're on a razor's edge, as one bad turn or roll can also spell disaster and stop even the most promising runs short.
If at any point you do feel like you're starting to master (and grow weary of) the game, Slice & Dice offers a ton of different ways to prevent that. Between different hero classes, new modes, harder difficulties, and several other modifiers you can mix and match together, there is a whole lot of game to explore that will feel fresh for a really long time. Oh, and if the prospect of playing Slice & Dice to unlock all of these things also sounds draining, there's a little check box in the settings menu that can just unlock everything for you.
Dice pocket
Slice & Dice is available on PC as well, but I can't imagine a better home for it than on mobile. The pacing of the combat and overall run structure fits incredibly well for on-the-go play, and layout of the action looks great in both portrait and landscape mode. The game doesn't have cloud saving for retaining progress between devices, but that doesn't feel all that important for a run-based game where unlocks can all be bypassed.
Something else nice about Slice & Dice is you don't have to take my word for all of this. You can try it out yourself for free and see what up to 12 fights of a run feel like, which should give you a really good sense of whether this game is for you and if you like it on mobile. If you decide you are all-in on it, a single $8.99 purchase unlocks the full game.
The bottom line
There's so much possibility space in Slice & Dice and the game is designed expertly to let you explore all of it on your own terms, all while delivering a super satisfying and strategic roguelike experience. There's not much else I could ask for from a game like this, except more ones like it, I guess.