Goo Slasher

Since Halloween is on Friday, and since everyone from Livejournal to Photobucket is spraying their home pages with pumpkins, bats and more black than a goth kid's bedroom, I felt I should review something that was at least slightly related to the upcoming holiday. In truth, Halloween doesn't mean all that much to me these days. There isn't a TV station in the country showing a single solitary horror movie on Friday, and since I'm now an adult it's no longer socially acceptable for me to throw a sheet over myself, run around to other people's houses and demand chocolate. But hey, I can buy my own chocolate now, so don't cry for me.

Anyway, with the wave of Halloween themed games flooding the Internet this past week, it wasn't hard to find a crappy one. OK, so Goo Slasher isn't the most frightening of games, but it's got autonomous blobs of walking goo in it, and that's got to be a little spooky, right?



The first thing to keep in mind when playing Goo Slasher is that the controls are incorrectly labelled. I admire the developer's eagerness to get this game out there for the masses, but maybe it wouldn't have been a bad idea to double check the controls, only so the player will know which button is jump and which one is attack.



Anyway, when you do figure out which button does what, you can start slashing at goo as you march around in your knight's helmet, wifebeater vest and tartan kilt (now there's a terrifying combination.) There's definitely something satisfying about cleaving through the goo monsters and watching them explode with a nice splodgy sound. This is all good for about ten seconds, before you realise that this is it. This is all you do.



For ninety seconds you stand in the same area. The goo monsters come from each side, one at a time, at the same pace for the duration of the game. Basically all you have to do is walk a few paces to the left and right, swing your sword, then repeat the process. Hardly an exhilarating experience, unless you consider risking repetitive strain injury in your ring finger exciting.



You can always spice things up by trying the jumping attack, but that gets old quickly when you realise it leaves you open for completely avoidable death, and it really doesn't do anything that a regular attack can't.



YAY! Wow. I guess after a minute and a half of total monotony it would have been asking too much for a satisfactory ending. If I wanted a boring game with which to waste my time, it would have been a lot faster for me to just load Minesweeper. But then I wouldn't have had anything to review this week. So thank you, Goo Slasher - your lameness means this blog survives til November.