Monster Roller is going to be a great mix of slots and sword-swinging adventure

Last week, we wrote about how developers in Asia are starting to find out that you can’t just clone games any more – you’ve got to improve on them. More established studios like Boomzap Entertainment are doing a bit more than that, though.

At Casual Connect Amsterdam, Boomzap showed off a new game called Monster Roller. It’s an RPG that uses a slot machine for its combat mechanic. The slot machine combat mechanic is nothing new; Konami produced a slot machine RPG back in 2013. But it hasn’t been picked up as quickly as Pazu Dora’s sliding gems or generic card-based combat.

In a market that’s oversaturated with mobile RPGs based off of card combat mechanics, Monster Roller comes as a refreshing change.

The game is still in the early stages of development, but it’s clear from a video on the Boomzap blog (that’s not embeddable) that there will be four elements governing the playable critters in game. Each reel on the slot machine will correspond to a monster you’ve got in the team, and each monster has two phases you can toggle to and fro at will. These phases affect what results you get when you play the slots, which can range from status attacks like poison and stuns, to heals and shields.

The visuals for Monster Roller looks decidedly Western, but the Asia-based studio says the game is still in its early development stages, and it has yet to figure out where it will choose to market the game first. Boomzap Entertainment has a puzzle game called Rescue Quest that launched first in the US.

There is no fixed date for the launch of Monster Roller, but Boomzap says it’s going to be transparent in the development progress, presumably via its blog.

See: What this very simple puzzle gets right about mobile games