‘Slice & Dice’ – TouchArcade
Slice & Dice is a dice-based roguelike dungeon crawler from developer Tann that has been out in early access on PC and Android for the past few years, and this week it received a massive version 3.0 update alongside a very long-awaited and much-requested iOS release. I know Android folks have been able to play this for a while now, but I’m an iPhone person, so forgive me if I’m late to the party in saying: Slice & Dice is just about a perfect mobile game.
We’ve been down this road plenty of times before. A developer takes a well-known mechanic and implements it into an roguelike game making for something that’s easy to grasp and immediately accessible but also filled with layers and layers of depth. The closest parallel I can draw is the King Cashing games which used slot machines as the core of its battling system. Slice & Dice works very similarly. Each member of your party has its own dice that is rolled before each turn. What’s on each side of the dice can vary wildly, but generally you’ll be looking for an attack or defense action.
You can lock in a dice’s action after a roll or you can try to re-roll and get something else. You have limited re-rolls so if you aren’t careful you can get stuck with something you didn’t really want, but that’s also part of the strategy. Once you’ve rolled and locked in your choices for each party member you then perform each of their actions on the enemy or enemies in front of you. Once each member has taken their turn it’s the enemy’s chance to go, and things go back and forth like that until one side is wiped out. Hopefully the enemy’s side.
This isn’t necessarily Earth-shaking stuff here! It’s a very competent set of base mechanics built around the novelty of dice rolls, but that could describe just about every RPG in existence. No, where Slice & Dice truly shines is in its mind-boggling depth in terms of character builds, items, abilities, and weapons. It just does. Not. End. Each face of each of the dice can be upgraded or customized, there’s a seemingly endless stream of class types for your party members, there’s practically always some new item or spell or something happening after every battle. It’s almost unbelievable.
This is a game you can just kick back and play… forever, I guess? I mean, it’s a game you can “beat” by making it through all 20 battles including a ferocious final boss battle, but like any roguelike worth its salt it’s not really about the destination but the journey. With so many directions your party can grow, with so much reliant on the RNG of rolling dice, with so many varieties of enemies to learn and plan around, this is just a game that doesn’t seem like it’s going to get old anytime soon.
Slice & Dice was originally a landscape-oriented game, and it does feel most natural in that position, but this new iOS release does feature portrait orientation support and holy smokes does that make this an easy “go to” game. It switches on the fly so pick your poison depending on your current mood. You also can try out the game completely for free, with access to the “Easy” route which features just 12 battles instead of 20, and WAY less stuff like items and enemies and whatnot. But it’s more than enough to decide if this is a game for you, and a one-time unlock of $8.99 gets you the full enchilada, so not hesitate to give Slice & Dice’s free version a go.
