Slaughter 3 is a name that tells you everything you need to know – i.e., there are two other Slaughter games. This is the third. It’s all about slaughtering people. Job done. Like the previous game, Slaughter 2: Prison Assault, …
Slaughter 3 is a name that tells you everything you need to know – i.e., there are two other Slaughter games. This is the third. It’s all about slaughtering people. Job done.
Like the previous game, Slaughter 2: Prison Assault, Slaughter 3 sees you entering the grounds of a prison and shooting the inmates. On this occasion, however, those inmates have broken out and taken control of the entire prison complex, killing the staff and sending the surrounding villagers scurrying into the woods.
A short cut-scene with some nifty camera work delivers you into the carnage. You arrive by boat, Travis Bickle-like with a mohawk hairstyle and murderous intent, and scale the wall of the prison before breaking in and shooting everything on sight.
To move, you slide your thumb around on the left of the screen, while the looking controls are on the right. There’s a crosshair on the right, too, and if you hold this while hovering your cursor over an enemy the cursor turns red and you automatically fire. If you’ve played a third-person action game on mobile, the setup will be familiar.
For the most part, the combat is frantic and messy. Prisoners shamble in your direction, and you need to take them out before they get to you. Once they come within arm’s reach, your fire button becomes a stab button, but it’s best to avoid letting them get that close.
Enemies can approach from all angles, especially outside, so you need to stay on your toes and keep looking around you the whole time. In that respect, Slaughter 3 feels a lot like the original Doom or Wolfenstein. In other words, quite primitive.
The campaign is broken down into missions. Every time you complete a mission, or die and return to your base, you wake up in a cabin with a sarcastic chap called Nick. Your conversations with Nick are full of character and dark humor, though the localization leaves a lot to be desired. The speech is all in Russian, too, so you need to rely on subtitles.
There’s a laptop in this base cabin, and you use it to access missions, buy guns, equip allies once you unlock them, and so on.
To start with, your missions are fairly basic – in fact, the first one sees you searching various bins for gun parts – and most of them boil down to either fetching or killing. Either way, your target is usually indicated on the screen in white, but not the route towards it.
This matters because Slaughter 3’s prison complex is a bit of a maze, and you can easily find yourself in a dead end. It takes a few goes before you work out how to navigate.
Some doors are locked, others are unlocked, and doors that are locked in one mission can be unlocked in the next. Also, there are doors that can only be unlocked by certain party members, injecting Slaughter 3 with a healthy dose of Metroidvania.
The overall arc of Slaughter 3 involves steadily unlocking weapons and allies until you have them all, by doing short, punchy missions and ransacking bins. It’s a solid enough premise, the dialogue has a nice strain of black humor, and the Metroidvania elements add a dimension to the meathead action.
Graphically, meanwhile, Slaughter 3 is in fairly good shape. The 3D visuals are sharp, the character models are imaginatively drawn, and there are a few macabre touches such as the way a shotgun round at close range causes the hapless target’s head to explode.
Slaughter 3 is a bit too rough and ready to satisfy serious fans of third-person action games on mobile, but its unique Russian superjail setting and squalid, mildly disturbing aesthetic keep it interesting all the same.Â
You can find Slaughter 3 on both the App Store and Google Play.
