Quick Slick Deadly Review

All this could be overlooked if not for one particularly glaring fact: you quickly realize that there is, in fact, only one level. Quick Slick Deadly has maybe ninety seconds of actual scrolling: each thirty-second level either starts you a little further along in the scroll or starts you in the same location, only with a few new enemy spawns and new win conditions. It’s a real shame, because Quick Slick Deadly contains a few basic gameplay mechanics that, in another game, might be put to good use. Take, for example, the alternate weapon mechanic. When playing as the Fighter class, each enemy you shoot leaves a particular icon in a three-slot tracker. Fill all three slots with the same enemy icon, and your ship gains a powerful alternate fire depending on the icon. This mechanic alone could make for some fun gameplay: going through levels, you could be careful to destroy only certain enemies, picking out the three-in-a-row that give you the alternate weapon you want. Sadly, in Quick Slick Deadly, levels go by so quickly and have such harsh restrictions for completion that you’ll never be able to even consider putting alternate weapon choice to your advantage. Aside from the single level where completion is dependent on using the mechanic, the possibilities are simply never realized.

There’s a similar situation with speed boost mechanic. Flying your ship through glowing blue rings will help it store up fuel which can be used for a quick speed boost. It sounds useful for quick getaways, but in practice, the levels are so completely chock full of insta-death enemies that getting a speed boost turns out to be the last thing you want to do, and the player paradoxically might even start steering clear of these power-ups to avoid making the screen go faster.

The news isn’t all bad, however. One interesting mechanic is the Survivor class’ leeching ability, which lets the player charge up energy by flying close to enemy attacks, giving the player access to special shield and weapon abilities. This provides a unique incentive to stay close to the line of fire, without actually getting hit directly. Sadly, the extreme brevity of the levels, and the fact that there is only one level at all, means that the player never has a chance to really put this ability to use. Quick Slick Deadly simply feels half-finished, and more importantly, feels like it’s missing a good strong playtest.

There’s one defence that, on its face, might seem to make up for all of the game’s deficiencies, and that is its three-dollar price tag. After all, for only three dollars, what could one possibly expect from a game, right? But this actually brings up a good point: inexpensive casual games can’t be compared to modern studio-produced games, but this should be more a question of content than quality. There are great three-dollar games out there that are appropriately small; even a well-done simple Pong game or Solitaire can be entertaining. Quick Slick Deadly simply doesn’t have the entertaining core to make it worth playing. For casual gamers who consider all difficulty to be fun and don’t mind goofing around with bad games, you can give it a try. For all others, you may want to look elsewhere.