The Slormancer

Action RPGs live or die on how their levelling systems feel, and The Slormancer's pitch is unusually ambitious for the genre: everything levels. Your character levels. Your skills level, independently, evolving into new forms as they climb. Your weapons level. Your individual items level. One reviewer, clearly delighted by how far the idea goes, sums it up as "the Disgaea of the ARPG genre" — a reference to a strategy series famous for stacking numbers on numbers until the whole system becomes its own kind of puzzle. For a genre where "more loot, bigger numbers" is usually the entire pitch, that's a genuinely distinctive foundation to build on.

Systems deep enough to impress genre veterans

The praise from experienced players carries real weight here, because it's coming from people with a lot to compare it against. One reviewer explicitly identifies as an ARPG veteran with over a decade in Path of Exile, plus real time in Last Epoch, Torchlight and Diablo, and still finds enough in The Slormancer's opening stretch to engage seriously with its systems. Another calls it the best indie ARPG they've played "since Chronicon," a specific and high compliment within the genre. The layered levelling design is the reason why: because skills, weapons and items each grow on their own track, players are constantly making meaningful decisions about what to invest in rather than simply accumulating a single power number, and the pixel art presentation gets consistent credit for feeling carefully crafted rather than a generic aesthetic choice.

The wall almost everyone hits

What makes this review necessary rather than a straightforward recommendation is how consistently a single specific complaint recurs across the negative review sample, phrased differently by dozens of independent players but describing exactly the same thing. Right before the game's final chapter and final boss, players are required to complete a substantial, unexplained grind — described by one reviewer as arriving "out of nowhere," by another as "a series of 'trials'" that gate progress, and by a third with the simple, exasperated headline "WHY THE GRIND?!" One detailed review breaks down the shape of the complaint precisely: the first ten hours are great, and then the game "turns into an engineered grindfest that just disrespects the player's time." Another, with over 100 hours logged, writes a lengthy pro-and-con breakdown and lands on the same core issue — repetitive grinding required after the campaign, specifically to gear up for the mid-game and final boss, undermining a system that had been engaging up to that point.

This isn't a scattered handful of impatient players. The specificity and consistency of the complaint — the same location in the game, the same "out of nowhere" framing, the same sense of an artificial time-extension rather than an earned challenge — is what elevates it from a normal difficulty complaint to a real structural design issue worth flagging clearly to a prospective buyer.

A second, related question about build variety

A quieter but related criticism concerns how much genuine choice the deep systems actually translate into. One especially thorough reviewer, sceptical of marketing claims about "HUGE LOOT SYSTEMs" and wide build diversity, did the legwork of checking publicly shared endgame builds on YouTube and found the overwhelming majority converging on a small handful of options rather than the broad space the layered levelling design implies. That's a meaningful counterpoint to the game's central selling point: a system built around independent progression tracks for skills, weapons and items should, in theory, produce enormous build diversity, and at least one detailed investigation suggests the practical result is narrower than the pitch.

Combat itself draws milder but real criticism too — several reviewers who otherwise praise the progression systems describe the actual moment-to-moment fighting as becoming repetitive over a long playthrough, with map design and pacing weakening somewhat in the later game relative to the stronger opening campaign.

A studio still building

None of the above reads as a studio that's abandoned the game. Slormite Studios has kept publishing monthly "Slormite Chronicles" development updates well over a year past the 1.0 release, through mid-2026 and continuing — the kind of sustained, visible cadence that suggests the grind-wall complaint, if it hasn't already been addressed, remains a live target for future balance work rather than a permanent fixture the developer has ignored.

Where this leaves a buyer

At NZ$28.99, The Slormancer is a genuinely strong action RPG for roughly its first stretch, with a progression system ambitious enough to win over players who've spent years in the genre's biggest names. The specific, well-documented grind requirement before the final chapter is worth treating as a known cost rather than a surprise — players willing to push through it, or to wait for a patch that eases it, are likely to find a lot to like underneath. Anyone specifically allergic to an artificial difficulty or time wall late in a campaign should read the negative review sample closely before buying, because this isn't a matter of a few frustrated players — it's close to the single most consistent complaint in the game's entire history.