AbleGamers Web Game of the Week: Monster Slayers

{sidebar id=1}There are many different types of RPG; shooters, massively multiplayer, zombie killing, and hat collecting.  Today’s AbleGamers Web game of the week is about the latter in Monster Slayer.

You play the role of a young lad visited by the ghost of a dead king who is… dead-set on seeking revenge against the monsters who killed him.  Believe it or not, this is an RPG reminiscent of final fantasy tactics.  You're given one base class that can upgrade it into another class and that class has another 3 upgrades.

You are allowed to take 5 party members, including yourself, on each journey. You’ll want to make sure that you have some melee, range, and a healer.  Along the way, you'll be challenged with facing some of the monsters your dead advisor wants you to kill for revenge. When you kill these challenging monsters you'll be given a hat.

Each hat has a special ability such as additional armor, hit points, or damage.  These fancy head garments are the game’s version of a gear system.  I can't honestly say it adds much to the game. However, you are also gathering reagents, which do add another element to the game.

Each of these reagents can be combined with a different reagent to summon a single use ability in battle.  Some of the summons heal your entire party or add a specific type of damage, while others give you cosmetic benefits.

The game is relatively accessible, if you can use the mouse. There are no keyboard shortcuts – the mouse is your only option.  As the first game made by this nonprofessional developer, it's less about what accessibility isn't in the game and more about what they didn't think about.

Visual recommendations are a little bit tricky in this scenario.  Although the developer does use traditional colorblind unfriendly green-to-red health bars, there are small numerical values directly above said bars.  The reason I call this tricky is because you don't really have any control over who's getting hurt. Therefore, it's little to no consequence if you couldn't tell who is getting hurt in the battle.

Moreover, there is an additional health bar covering the overall health of the party in the upper left-hand corner.  Everything is written out in text; Deaf gamers needn’t worry about missing anything important.  In fact, the game sounds are relatively annoying and turning them off would be advisable.

Now, the way you control the side scrolling action is by clicking on one of four buttons: fallback, defend, attack, and quick move.  Each button’s function should be self explanatory but it lends itself to more manageable accessibility.  Most of these buttons can be hit in your own time making it good for the motor impaired.

There is also an auto save function and 5 save-slots.  The game will not progress until you push a button and enter the next battle, which means you can go away from the game at any time for any reason and it will be there waiting for you.

As far as our Web game of the week goes, Monster Slayer is definitely one of the most accidentally accessible and rather fun titles we've reviewed in a while. There is rather small text in some portions of the game, particularly in between fights but other than that accessibility is well done for a developer’s first time.