Video Game / Heart&Slash

Life, love and death in a world of robots.

Heart&Slash is a 3D indie Roguelike/Brawler videogame created by Aheartfulofgames and published by Badland Games.

During a normal day in the HeartTech facility, the Quality Assurance System (QuAsSy) suddenly rebels against the scientists working there, starting a Robolution which will bring humans to extinction, leaving only robots on the planet. 100 years later, a robot named "HEART" is assembled in the factory and appears to be different than the other robots. Because of this, it is immediately flagged as an anomaly and hunted down by its own kind. HEART wants to keep its uniqueness and it will achieve its goal, even if that would mean slaughtering all other robots one after another.

A Kickstarter was launched in February 14, 2014 and successfully funded on March 19, 2014, then a demo of the game was released on Game Jolt. In October 21, 2014 the game was released on Steam Early Access, then fully released on July 24, 2016 on Xbox Live and Play Station Network. It was later released on Steam on August 9, 2016 and on Nintendo Switch on December 22, 2017.

Tropes present in this game:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The plot was kicked off by QuAsSy suddenly rebelling and taking control of the robot production, dominating all the robots in order to destroy all humans.
• After the End: The game is set 100 years after the Robolution, where humanity has been wiped from the planet. The tutorial takes place just before the robots rise up.
• Amnesiac Hero: HEART's memory module 2 is damaged, so it cannot remember anything from 100 years ago. It doesn't even remember who or what itself is.
• Armor of Invincibility: The fully upgraded C.O.P. Body. Each upgrade costs EIGHT boxes of scraps and it takes away two heart containers, but it maxes out all defensive stats which will turn every damage into a half-heart damage.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: The game cover art invokes this.
• Badass Adorable: HEART is a small white robot with a monitor as head displaying a heart, but that won't prevent it from kicking robotic asses like there's no tomorrow.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: The 1% set consists in giving your character a business suit with benefits related to your scraps: the body increases the scraps you obtain while the arms and the legs increase damage and speed respectively depending on how much scraps you currently have. Needless to say, this allows you to kick asses even harder and look nice at the same time.
• Batter Up!: The Basebat. There's also the Mad Bat, which has nails on top.
• Battle Boomerang: The Roborang, obviously.
• BFS: The Terminusest. It's a sword almost as big as your character, but also pretty slow.
• Big Bad: QuAsSy, a.k.a. the Quality Assurance System.
• Boring, but Practical: in some rooms/areas, you'll face Tripods equipped with Dispensers that will spawn Utility Bots endlessly. These usually die in one or two hits and grant up to three Scraps. If you're patient enough, you can farm them in order to max out your equipment and even replenish your health, if you manage to not get hit too much.
• Brain Uploading: Dr. Symphatic does that in order to hack the factory 100 years later and build HEART, along with giving instructions about your goals and powerups. Turns out that it was actually QuAsSy impersonating him in order to test HEART and make it another elite robot soldier. Even more clear during one of the SLASH sidequest's in the city, where it attempts to make you betray SLASH. Not only that, in subsequent playthroughs after you achieve the Good Ending, it will actually show QuAsSy's name and all messages will be spiteful.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: SLASH reassures the player to not get frustrated doing its quests, as the objective may show up in another playthrough.
• Bullet Time: The Clockwork Hands will allow this once fully upgraded. Time will slow down considerably when you stand still and resume at normal speed when you move.
• Cap: You can only have up to 20 heart containers and 10 boxes of scraps.
• Chainsaw Good: Some enemies wield chainsaws. When they see you, they rev them up and start chasing you for a while. It applies to you too however, since it's also one of the weapons.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The color of some enemies tell their elemental weakness: green ones are weak to fire, yellow ones to electricity and white ones to simple melee.
• Cool Shades: The Hip Glasses. Wearing them grants a red tint to the screen.
• Crapsaccharine World: The graphics are cartoony and colorful, and the enemies look kinda goofy, but once you reach the city you'll see that everything is abandoned, with broken cars, giant pillars of wrecks on fire and more robots that want to destroy you, including the police robots.
• Critical Annoyance: A variation for enemies. Due to the lack of health bars, unless you get the Clockwork Lens, all enemies will start flashing red when they are about to die. Subverted for the player: when your health gets low you get an on-screen red warning which eventually dims out.
• Critical Existence Failure: If you get down to half heart, you probably won't even notice. As soon as you reach zero, you EXPLODE spectacularly.
• Cutlass Between the Teeth: You can find robot dogs in the game, and some of them are equipped with a sword they hold in their mouth. The unlockable character Eclipse is a robot husky and plays similarly.
• Damage Discrimination: Averted, both you and the enemies can take damage from the attacks from the respective allies and/or their own attacks too, if possible. If you are skilled enough, you can make the robots in an area kill each other until there's only one left. Or not even that.
• Dark Is Not Evil: SLASH, a black and spiky robot carrying a huge cleaver who attacks HEART on their first meeting. It looks like prime bad guy material, but going through SLASH's quests shows that spiky robot is HEART'S only ally/friend.
• Deadly Disc: The Flyng Radial.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Some weapons like the Vorpal Dagger can be upgraded to the point they'll hit absurdly fast, and some of them can even stun-lock enemies.
• Degraded Boss: The Hearttech Elite Guard, one of the endgame enemies, is a smaller, weaker version of the B-DSS Knight, one of the first bosses in the game.
• Developer's Foresight: Utility bots can spawn with different kinds of ray that buff other enemies, from healing to temporary invincibility. However, if you step in front of the ray, you get the buff instead.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Dynamite. It aims towards the nearest enemy and if you're too close it'll blow up in your face. However, it inflicts massive damage and ignores armor. If used correctly, it can deal with most enemies, including flying ones.
  • Also, guns tend to be rather slow and require you to stand still in order to aim, making you an easy target (especially for enemies that can shoot). However, they can remove huge chunks of armor from enemies, leaving them open to melee attacks.
• Disco Tech: The Disco Bomb. Throwing it will play a disco rendition of the laboratory music and make the enemies dance for some seconds, depending on how much you upgraded it.
• Double Jump: Every character can perform this, however it's removed if you get the Rocket Pack since you can fly instead.
• Double Unlock: After you obtain certain achievements, you'll unlock new weapons and body parts. However, these will still be in the Equipment list as "???" until you actually find and wear them once.
• Double Weapon: Twin Blades, Twin Scythes, Volt Blades and Fire Blades. The last two are made out of lasers.
• Dual Wielding: Bad Boy Knuckles, Hand Blades, Dual Hatchet and Elite Blades. And Training Weights. Some enemies wield two blades too.
• Early Game Hell: The game starts you off with some fairly basic equipment, and you will likely not be used to the large swarms of enemies thrown your way, but as the game goes on and you defeat more enemies and unlock gear, the odds greatly tip to your favor. It's helped by the fact that the base playable character, HEART, with certain achivements, carries over some health, defense, and attack upgrades.
• Elemental Weapon: Each weapon type has at least one elemental version, like the Fire Slicer or the Volt Slicer.
• Elite Mooks: In the third level. They are mostly white, with colored parts indicating their weaknesses.
• Endless Running Game: An endless mode was added to the game after the game's release and when the game launched on different consoles. In it, you play as Slash and try your best to get the highest score you can until you die.
• Enemy Scan: The Clockwork Lens. By default it shows the enemy health. Once upgraded it will show their weaknesses too, their position behind walls and have an increased range.
• Enemy Summoner: Combat and C.O.P. Tripods can be equipped with a Dispenser which allows them to continuously generate Utility Bots. They can also attack you by stomping with a leg or their body and fire a laser.
• Energy Weapon: One of the possible equipment settings for the enemies. For the player, there's the Lasergun and the B-DSS Head.
• Everything Trying to Kill You
• Exact Words: The Description for QuAsSy:
  Most errors in manufacturing and QR were human, and its task was to eradicate manufacturing errors.
• Experience Points: Scraps are this. You get them by killing enemies and, every 10 scraps, you obtain a box of scraps that can be used to upgrade yourself and your gear.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The Particle Cannon. You can switch between electric or fire damage in order to damage the appropriate weapons.
• Flaming Sword: The Fire Slicer, of course.
• Flunky Boss: Two of them.
  • Lt. Copgore rarely attacks directly, instead dropping mooks to fight you most of the time.
  • Downplayed with Herbie: you fight it face to face most of the time, but sometimes it sorrounds you with its body and summons mooks you have to kill. However, the body inflicts Collision Damage so you can make the boss itself destroy them for you.
• Freeze Ray: The Freezer, a gun that can freeze enemies.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: QuAsSy was supposed to be a quality assurance machine (hence its name, "Quality Assurance System"), but eventually became an AI that took over the world and wiped out the human race.
• Fun with Acronyms: The C.O.P. D.O.G. description invokes this trope stating that the government likes acronyms.
• Fuuma Shuriken: The Ninja Star is the most obvious example, but the Ricochet Star one-ups it by being a Precision-Guided Boomerang.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: When you get the Bad Ending, you'll find out that the current HEART has been put through a long combat test by QuAsSy and then disassembled to become part of its "perfect quality army". After that, when a new game begins, a new HEART is assembled and the process starts over again; any HEART that falls during the process (i.e. the player dying) is a "failure". Unless you complete all SLASH's quests.
• Gatling Good: Some C.O.P. Biggrunts can spawn equipped with two gatling guns, one per arm.
• Glass Cannon: Every part from the Proto set makes you more vulnerable, but increases your strength in exchange.
• Gone Horribly Right: QuAsSy was designed to find errors and correct them. Sadly, it was "programmed too strictly", and thus considered humans a source of manufacturing errors, and took steps to eliminate the issue.
• Guide Dang It!: Some objectives can be quite cryptic to the point that you might need some assistance.
  • If you manage to help SLASH in all missions, you'll meet it at the final boss battle, on the verge of death and QuAsSy will be completely invincible. How to win then? You recycle YOURSELF next to SLASH, which will weaken QuAsSy to the point you'll only need to hit it once. However, this option doesn't even exist during normal gameplay and, despite SLASH trying to give you hints, how were you supposed to know that you had to check the character upgrade screen, considering especially that by this point you'd be fully upgraded already?
  • How to unlock the achievement "Creature of the Night"? You have to play the game during October 31st. What? What do you mean you didn't know? It's so obvious!
• Heal Thyself: There are multiple ways to do this.
  • Some enemies have a heart over their head and destroying them restores you 1 heart;
  • In the laboratory you can find in yellow boxes medikits that restore you 2 hearts;
  • Some Utility Bots have a healing ray and they use it to cure their allies, but you can step in front of the ray and gain 1 heart;
  • The Vampire Blade restores your health by damaging your enemies;
  • The Scavenger set restores you 1 heart every time you kill a certain number of enemies (1 heart for every body part for that set, each with an independent meter);
  • If you maxed out the number of boxes of scraps you can have, every 10 scraps you'll gain back half heart;
  • When you need to restore a good part of your health immediately, you can sacrifice a piece of equipment. The Spiked Suit is especially made for this: it cannot be upgraded, but restores a good chunk of health if recycled.
• Heart Container: Not counting your own upgrades, which give you 2 extra hearts each, pretty much EVERY item can become one. In fact, if you recycle a piece of equipment while your health is full, you gain an extra heart, until you have 20 of them.
• Hearts Are Health: Given the main Motif, your Life Meter is represented by hearts, unsurprisingly. You start with 6 of them and you can upgrade yourself or recycle items while you have full health to obtain more, up to 20 hearts. By obtaining specific achievements, HEART will start with more health in every new playthrough.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Some enemies are equipped with a heavy armor which will bounce you back every time you hit them, but they will lose a piece of armor every hit and a few of them at once if hit on the back, then you can damage without problems the uncovered parts. Some weapons like the Vorpal Dagger or attacks like rockets and lasers are capable to pierce armor, while some firearms can remove a large number of pieces at once or even the entirety of them.
• Here We Go Again!: It's implied, after you achieve the Bad Ending, that every time HEART is disassembled into an Elite Mook, another one is built upon starting the game, which goes through the same ordeal until it passes QuAsSy's test and gets disassembled again. Until, obviously, you manage to break the loop and get the Good Ending.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Certain robots are capable of launching homing rockets, however you can move around the area to "maneuver" said rockets and make them hit the same robot launching them. You can also make police mortars shoot themselves.
  • The same can apply to you, however, if you're not careful with explosives.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Zig Zagged. QuAsSy is killable at first, but it will become impossible to defeat after you complete SLASH's sidequests. However, if you recycle yourself next to SLASH you'll be able to kill it with just one hit. This is necessary for the Good Ending.
  • An update double subverts this instead. QuAsSy can be defeated and is no more invincible, but doing so will grant you the Bad Ending. Justified since it's actually too powerful In-Universe.
• Hypocrite: QuAsSy considers HEART a traitor if they ultimately side with SLASH. Given that QuAsSy itself didn't just betray the human race, but has also been masquerading as HEART's creator, and spending at least some of that time trying to have HEART betray SLASH, this sentiment comes off as fairly hollow.
• Improbable Weapon User: Oh, so much. Just to name a few, you can unlock a couple of Training Weights, an Electric Guitar, a radio affixed to a stick (named Beat Stick) and even kitchen tools as weapons. Yes, including a frying pan and a rolling pin.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Sort of. When you reach the City, the time of the day or the weather (day/night/sunset/fog) is randomized too.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Subverted. The robots are almost all referred to as 'it', but probably don't really have a concept of gender in the first place, especially after humanity went extinct. Plus, anyone who could introduce the idea died off ages ago or doesn't really care.
  • Interestingly, Copgore is occasionally referred to as male, and even has a metal mustache to boot. This may be due to working with humans before and during the robolution.
  • The Scavenger Queen, Herbie, is also referred to as male a couple of times despite the specifically feminine title.
• Jet Pack: Called here "Rocket Pack". It allows flying for a short period of time and also makes you thrust forward instead of simply running faster.
• Joke Item: The Rubber Duck. It literally does nothing and the upgrades even warn you about this by telling you that you are wasting money. However since upgraded items, when recycled, grant more health than usual this can be used like some kind of health reserve. Plus, there's an achievement for defeating QuAsSy with the fully powered Rubber Duck.
• Just Toying with Them: QuAsSy, in the bad ending, is really just testing HEART to see if it works as an Elite Mook. It's only actively trying to kill Heart in the Good Ending, hence why it's a Hopeless Boss Fight until you revive SLASH.
• Laser Blade: The Zaber is the prime example for this game.
• Life Drain: The Vampire Blade allows this. It takes away up to five heart containers until you recycle or change it, but every hit has a chance to cure you.
• Light Is Not Good: QuAsSy looks like a bright gold and white skull, and the final level's decor, as you get higher, becomes more white and orange.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The entire game can qualify as this. You may find some excellent gear that will turn the game into a breeze or an utterly crappy one that will make it more challenging, and if you're low on health you may have to give away one of your pieces of equipment or hope that some enemies will drop health.
  • Advancing through SLASH's missions counts, seeing as you actually have to find SLASH in a playthrough in order to accept and turn in the quests. SLASH can also ask you to defeat a boss who might not even show up in a run.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: There are various types of shields in this game, including a Trashcan Lid. However, they require a bit of practice to be used since you have to time your attack with the enemy attack to parry, block and/or stun them.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Rocket Launcher equipment allows this to both you and enemies, while as a plus you have the Clockwork Cannonade and the Rocket Cam which both allow this when fully upgraded.
• Magic Wand: The Air Wand, the Fire Wand, the Ice Wand and the Poison Wand. Guess what they do?
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Training Weights. They are not that good at the beginning, but if you use them long enough they will eventually fully upgrade themselves without the need to spend a single box of scrap, becoming strong and fast enough to deal with most enemies.
  • Body parts in the "%1" series tend to be very weak without scraps, but they're generally well worth the investment; the torso in particular, once fully upgraded, can give upwards of two scraps even for killing a single enemy, making it far easier to upgrade your character and their gear.
• Mechanical Monster: The sewers boss Herbie, the Raider's Queen. It's a giant wurm-like robot composed by a old subway train.
• Motif: Hearts. The company where everything started is called HeartTech, there are hearts in the main menu background and the upgrade menus, the main character is called HEART and has a heart in its monitor head. Heck, even the developers are called Aheartfulofgames.
• Mook Maker: The C.O.P. Alarm does no harm but it will keep calling four C.O.P. enemies until you destroy it.
• Multi-Melee Master: You can have up to three different weapons and, if all of these are melee weapons, that's what you may as well become.
• Multiple Endings: Each playable character has its own dialogue with the final boss before and after the battle. However, only by playing as HEART and the Prototype you get the real endings.
  • Bad Ending: If during the course of various playthroughs you don't help SLASH until you both fight against QuAsSy, after defeating it you'll be told that you passed the test. Then, QuAsSy will disassemble HEART and turn it into one of its elite robots. ALL of them display a heart in the monitor.
  • Good Ending: After you meet SLASH enough times until you both fight QuAsSy, you'll find the former lying down, half broken. You have to recycle yourself and hit QuAsSy just once. At this point, both Heart and SLASH will merge and literally punch QuAsSy into space. After that, they return on the Earth and both hold hands.
• The Musketeer: You can have a blade and a gun in your weapon slots, but you'll never be able to use them at the same time.
• New Game Plus: A variation. If you die in a run and then start a new one, you can keep the boxes of scraps you obtained up to that point, allowing you to do some upgrades right away. Also, completing specific objectives increases your starting stats and gives you a few boxes of scraps to upgrade yourself.
• Nintendo Hard: If you die, you have to restart from the very beginning and, like in all roguelikes, rooms are randomized. The only ways you have to replenish your health can be not very practical, luck-based and/or require to sacrifice gear. Plus, some attacks (either enemy or your own, like bombs) deal a lot of damage, which gets worse when your defenses are lowered either by poison or a side effect from a piece of equipment. You better put the dodge mechanic to a good use.
• No-Damage Run: You get an achievement for completing an entire level without taking any damage.
• Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: Some rooms in the factory have bottomless pits while the entire third level is on a Space Elevator entirely composed of platforms above Earth. However, if you fall you'll just lose half heart and brought back on solid ground.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: The player character can hold giant ass swords like the Meat Cleaver and Terminusest with one hand. Probably justified since they're all robots.
  • Eclipse, the robot husky, one-ups this by holding a BFS with its mouth.
• One-Hit Kill: The Dueling Gun can kill any enemy, including bosses, in one single hit. However, it has no ammo when you find it and you have to buy singularly every bullet with your Scrap Boxes (up to three times), and the price increases each time.
• Only the Worthy May Pass: One of SLASH's quests expects you to survive for some time without the ability to dodge as a test for you.
• Permadeath: Expected, since it's a roguelike. However, you can keep the boxes of scraps you acquired during the previous playthrough.
• Permanently Missable Content: There's a chance that, in the City, a half-demolished building containing two items may spawn. However, these items are on a very high place and the only way to reach them is by jumping on platforms that fall when you stand on them. If you fail just one jump, these platforms don't reset and the items become impossible to obtain unless you have the Rocket Pack or, if you can perform an air dash and you have patience, by using the very tight broken columns.
• Playable Epilogue: All playthroughs after the Good Ending feature QuAsSy not even bothering to keep up its Sympathic charade, spitefully trying to demoralize you. One can speculate that its doing this just to destroy HEART over and over as to vent its anger.
• Player Nudge:
  • In the very first level, if you look above some doors, you'll be able to tell where you're supposed to go and what boss you're going to fight.
  • During the Tutorial you can't gain scraps. However, if you have some boxes of scraps from previous runs, look closely in the upgrade screen and you'll notice that the required boxes don't have a red outline, this means that your boxes counter is actually just invisible and you can acquire some upgrades to give yourself a better chance to defeat SLASH in order to unlock the Prototype.
• Poisoned Weapons: The Power Ax, the Poison Dagger, the Poison Wand and the Poison Grenades. Poisoned enemies (and the player too) lose their resistance to other elements and become even weaker to the ones they are already vulnerable against, making easier to kill them.
• Promoted to Playable: By fully completing SLASH's quests and seeing the Good Ending, you can unlock SLASH on the character selection screen. You can also play as ECLIPSE, a robotic husky dog, by defeating enough dog robots.
• Puzzle Boss: Herbie. The only way to defeat it is to enter inside of it from the tail after it crashes against a wall in an attempt to charge against you and destroy all its generators.
• Red Boxing Gloves: One of the available weapons.
• Reverse Grip: The player character holds all daggers like this.
• Robot Dog: It's a type of enemy in the game and an unlockable character.
• Robot War: The Robolution itself, guided by QuAsSy. The humans ended up being slaughtered and only the robots were spared. Anti-robot propaganda can still be found in the city.
• Rocket-Powered Weapon: What else, if not the Rocket Hammer?
• Sadistic Choice: Other than you can give away equipment that might be good to restore your health, during the story missions you may encounter SLASH in some sort of trouble and the only way you can save it is to give away a weapon or your hearts. Pretty much obligatory in the final battle after you completed all missions, since you must recycle yourself to save SLASH.
• Sequel Hook: While the Good Ending closes the story adequately, later playthroughs show that QuAsSy seems to have survived its defeat, leaving room for a possible followup. Whether new playthroughs after that are actually canon or not, however, is open to interpretation.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: if you're quick and good at dodging you can get enemies to whack each other, making your life juuust the tiniest bit easier.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The appropriately-named Shortgun
• Shout-Out: Now with its own page.
• Stingy Jack: Heart-o-ween looks like this, but also wears the same clothes as another horror icon. It can be unlocked only by playing the game around October 31st.
• Tennis Boss: Lt. Copgore, the attack plane boss of C.O.P. The only way to inflict damage on it is to hit a very large missile back at the plane whenever it launches one.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Not that unnecessary, since you have a short invincibility period while you perform it.
• Unstable Equilibrium: When you're low on health, you can cure yourself by recycling your gear. So, the more damage you take and the more you might be forced to give away good equipment to survive. Likewise, if you barely take any damage, you'll be perfectly fine by recycling some uninteresting pieces of equipment you'll find in the level and even increase your max health.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are a few times in the storyline where SLASH will need your help, but you can either decide to ignore and/or kill him. Doing this, however, won't make you progress towards the Good Ending.
• Videogame Dashing: SLASH can perform an air dash, while the Robnin can perform both an air and a ground dash. Eclipse can also dash backwards on the ground and normally in the air, while lunges forward as a method of attacking both on the ground and the air.
• Villainous Breakdown: After the Good Ending, QuAsSy stops bothering with the Sympathic disguise, and seems to have come to outright despise HEART and SLASH, with most of its phrases becoming spiteful, with at least one particular room type in the Factory feature it declaring its intent to destroy them if the enemies fail their job.
• Virtual Paper Doll: You'll see on your character every body part you have currently equipped, as well as the weapon you are currently holding. Same thing applies for the enemies.
• Wall Jump: The Sticky Legs give you this ability.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The B-DSS Head allows you to shoot a HUGE laser beam right in front of you that can hit multiple targets at once. It takes a while to fire and recharge but upgrades make the warmup faster, shorten the recharge time and increase the radius.
• Zero-Effort Boss: QuAsSy goes down in a single hit in the good ending.

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