33.8 hours played
Written 13 days ago
With a name like that I had one question: will I be wasting time in this game instead of doing other stuff because the game is great, or will I waste my time playing it because the game is bad. Well, you can guess the correct answer, but here are some details to make the picture more clear.
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[*] The game has no coherent style. Your characters go from anime girls in space to absolutely random stuff, like a ram, Nicola Tesla and just generic AI-generated anime girls. The same goes for weapon design: sure, plasma and rockets fit well into space setting, but what about katanas and boxing gloves? Those are just the most generic options in vampire survivors clones that are completely out of place here.
[*] Meta progression. There are a lot of things that you can buy for your meta currency. Sadly, most of them are just starting levels for the things you get in your run, to be precise - you can buy a total of 88 levels for weapons, survival and utilities. And just for a point of reference - most runs will end with you somewhere around level 100 (prebought levels are not counted), so you can basically double the amount of levels you have just by grinding meta currency. And you WILL grind, because the difficulty is built around you having those prebought levels as the enemies will have a faster progression than you do - making all of the starting runs doomed from the start and forcing you into those grindy short runs before you can actually play the game.
[*] Difficulty. As I already stated in the previous point, the starting experience is absolutely miserable. But, for whatever reason, I could not find a point when the difficulty becomes normal, as at some point I bought enough upgrades to go from unfairly hard runs to laughably easy ones, so from being frustrated I went to being bored - easily beating the enemies just because I wasted time on grind doesn’t feel rewarding.
[*] Mechanical mess. First, damage calculations. For whatever reason the game decided to calculate damage to players not per interval, like most things do, nor per hit, but per frame. So if you aren’t using a potato any contact with any enemy will immediately deal a lot of damage - more than the threshold for invulnerability activation, as that activation is not calculated as often as incoming damage. And this mechanic is made even worse by the fact that the enemies can spawn on each other, so the game tries to unstack them by giving them an insane acceleration - in your direction. And most of the enemies in that game don’t really die fast enough to avoid taking damage and dying as the result of that boost. Oh, also note that there are 2 melee weapons in the game, so half of the time dealing damage with those will deal damage to you as said weapons don’t really offer any kind of protection. The same goes for dash - with no invulnerability and really small visible area dashing in any direction will most likely lead to a collision and getting damaged instead of avoiding it.
[*] Maps. On one hand - this game actually has something on its map, like resource and power-up spawners. On the other - those are in fixed places, so instead of running circles in a rectangle you are running in circles between those spawners. There are other maps too, but they are “challenge maps” connected to certain characters and, to be honest, they aren’t that different from the main map (with only a few exceptions) and you will play those one time to unlock a meta reward and never visit them again.
[*] Background. Thank god you can disable the picture on it, as on some challenge maps you can’t see anything because of it. But even with the picture disabled, all of the spawners and outposts are placed in the background layer that moves with different speed from the rest of the game - creating situations where the zone you are trying to reach is further than it seems. Also there are enemies that attack said spawners and they are spawned in that background layer - so even though they don’t move your own movement may shift them out of your damaging areas.
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Conclusion: while I can’t say that the game was terrible, there are enough strange decisions made by the devs that make the game unenjoyable and just bad. While the price is low, you don’t really get anything good in return.
