12.4 hours played
Written 5 years ago
Bear with me, this is my first long review. Overall I'm recommending this game, as it was decently entertaining and it's only 1$ (and I got it on sale 40% off).
The gameplay is solid enough, basic twin-stick style shooting to take down waves of enemies coming at you from the sides of the screen. Your character shoots at crosshairs where your mouse is located, and can do a quick dash every 2-3 seconds depending on your stats until it reaches the crosshairs. The progression is fairly solid, staying relatively challenging without any real difficulty spikes aside from possibly the bosses, who are chosen at random; some bosses are pretty easy to downright unthreatening, while others can be incredibly difficult to deal with while still fighting the swarms of basic enemies. These bosses show up every so often (with health scaled to your level), and regular enemies stay spawning during your fight with them at no slowdown. You can even end up with multiple boss angels simultaneously if you don't kill each one fast enough. As you kill angels you gain levels and earn perks, a choice of 1 from a random 3 possibilities, thus allowing you to get stronger to face the tougher stock enemies the game will flood you with. You can even get one of five special transformations, each with their own unique perk, by acquiring three specific perks related to the transformation. Pretty simple, but a decent enough gameplay loop for a dollar.
Similarly, the graphics are pretty basic as well. Simple 16-bit sprites with minimal animation, with an additional simple attack animation for some of the boss angels. That said, the animations are clear enough in what they're doing, and the archers even have a small recoil on shooting appropriate for a small airborne creature firing an arrow as long as they are. Only your character and the bosses make any sounds, which actually keeps the game's noise down and helps you know when the bosses spawn and when more dangerous attacks are coming. I didn't pay too much attention to the music, but it was fitting for the gameplay and I don't believe it was limited to a single song.
However, the game does have numerous flaws. For one, there's no way to change your controls (WASD and mouse) or the game's audio and video settings, in or out of the game. In fact, there isn't even an options menu. With the right steam settings you can manually set up controller and keyboard for the game, but that still leaves you with no way to play the game outside of full screen at full volume. There's also no way to continue your progress in game later, due to no save function. This generally isn't a huge issue, but can be annoying given that it tracks your highest kill count and goes on forever (more on that later).
Also unhelpful are the descriptions of the perks. At best these give you a rough idea of what the perk will do, and at worst tell you absolutely nothing. Even the descriptive ones don't usually fully mention what stats will be affected by it, much less by how much. I've created a guide to help explain everything I could, but I feel you shouldn't have to refer to an outside source to know what most of your perks do. There's also no way to check what ones you've gotten after the fact.
I think the most disappointing part however is the end of the game. More to the fact, that there IS no end. The story, the game description, these all describe how you are working to open the Hell's Gate and bring destruction to humanity. In the end though, you don't get ANYTHING in game to show that you've "won". When you reach level 300 and finally get the achievement for opening the gate absolutely nothing happens or changes. It's a frankly painful endurance run to even get that far as well, as the game basically stops changing or getting harder for the last 2/3rds of it. At level 100 the next to most powerful enemy starts appearing, at 200 the final enemy starts appearing, but between those gates literally nothing really changes. They don't send higher amounts of enemies at you (at least not noticeably), they don't start spawning more bosses, nothing. I was super disappointed when I got the very last, hardest achievement... and the game didn't even seem to notice. I kept going for a while after that, but nothing changed in the slightest and eventually I just didn't care to stay alive any further.
All in all, for a single dollar this game isn't bad. I still got a couple hours of enjoyment out of it, and definitely don't regret my purpose. I'd recommend getting it if you enjoy this style of game. Just be aware that it has its problems, and it's no masterpiece.
Recommended, probably like 6.5 or 7/10
