Luck Be a Landlord lets you fight the evils of rental accommodation by using a customisable slot machine to generate cash. It’s a daft premise, but sets up a simple game that’s all about finding synergies to maximise your score.
Each time you spin, the symbols on your slot machine randomise and reward you with coins, depending on what they are, their position, and their potential interactions with each other. Between spins, you’ll add new symbols to the rotation, hoping to find icons that combo with others in your collection.
For example, a Mouse will “eat” any adjacent Cheese, destroying the symbol but providing you with 20 coins each time it happens. There are many small interactions like this, and rarer symbols provide more powerful effects. The Beastmaster, for instance, can make animal symbols (like Mice) pay out twice as much.
On top of the slot machine symbols are passive items, rewarded after you make your rent payment, which steadily goes up each time (too real). Symbols can directly give more coins or enhance symbols in your collection, and it’s in finding these juicy combinations when your money total can really start climbing.
It’s very satisfying to discover a winning synergy; there are plenty of ways to secure victory, and there’s definitely some strategy to unpick here. Even after learning the game’s simple systems, though, securing success can be quite tough; sometimes it really feels like there’s nothing you could’ve done to win. Rerolls and symbol removal can help, but these aren’t always available, so sometimes you can feel a little stuck.
Early on in a run, you can’t afford to be too picky, but diluting your slot machine with disparate symbols makes things much harder as you go on. Ideally you want to hone in on one or two combinations, but there’s no guarantee you’ll find what you’re looking for, and the game’s quick pace and spin-to-win mechanic often don’t provide you enough flexibility to turn things around.
There’s absolutely fun to be had here, and the more you delve into it, the more potential strategies you’ll discover. However, finding those satisfying moments is made tougher by a lack of opportunities to adapt. Luck Be a Landlord is an interesting roguelike to explore, but it didn’t hook us in the way that many others in the genre have.
