This game is a roguelike. You take a character into a dungeon with little to no backstory and hit monsters while trying to survive against increasingly impossible odds. The issue with Hack, Slash, Loot, is the odds are about all you have. When you begin playing, you will start in a random room, with random fixtures and possibly random monsters. As in all roguelikes, at the beginning you exchange a few blows and misses against enemies until you can get better gear, but this game has no inventory, you don't heal over time, and realistically the only ways you can heal are to find potions and scrolls which give you back health (or award bonuses are curses against your character), or to find a holy or necromantic weapon to randomly give back a hitpoint upon hitting a monster.
This is a problem. It means you must be very lucky to score enough hits on the monsters you find to kill them, to find a weapon which can restore your health, to hit often enough for the health to be restored, to not face monsters that can kill you in four turns while you are crossing your fingers that the level isn't swarming with kobolds, whose archers can poison you and doom you to death since _you can't heal._ Without inventory management you can't grab items and save them for later, which allows the game to devolve neatly into will you die won't you die, because you have absolutely no choice over what happens. You can't even go back upstairs to escape from a nasty encounter. If the game wants you dead, you will be, and it's almost predetermined based on the luck of your draw.
On the technical side, the game is cute and even charming, but turns can take frustratingly long sometimes due to the fact friendly monsters take forever to move and woe be to you if you're in a room with four of them, because your turn speed will slow to a crawl as they rush to block doorways and otherwise get in your way. For the amount of game you get here, you're getting an awful lot of polish and detail but for the fact it isn't much of a game, and its fun wears off as soon as you realize you could let the computer take over playing your character and you would meet the same outcome.
There are other roguelikes out there that are simple, easy to get into, and above all, free. If you look up "Castle of the Winds" you will have found an old but extremely good roguelike with inventory management, an entire skill and magic system, and best of all for new players, difficulty settings, a town to relax in and buy new equipment, and a save/load game feature, which is far better than this game could ever be. Hack, Slash, Loot is nothing short of disappointing and requires not a whit of strategy or thought to win.
