Broventure: The Wild Co-op

I wish there was a neutral option here. For the price, it's decent, and fun in short bursts, and it has a cute art style. But...it needs a serious balance pass. Why does the sarbakan do SO much more damage than anything else? Weapons seem really unbalanced, and variations of them are just a handful of elemental types. There are very few weapon combinations, and no way to banish a weapon either so you might get totally screwed because it keeps throwing a turret at you over and over. Also, for a game that is pushed as co-op, why is it host only progression? It would be nice if you could at least retain the currency you earn in multiplayer. The scaling in co-op is also slightly overtuned, making it a real struggle. Does it scale per player? I have no idea, because I can't find info in the game about it! Oh, and you cannot skip the intro movie. Like just...why. What compelled the devs to make it unskippable? I don't want to watch this every single time I load the game.

It's an okay game. Its a bullet heaven game similar to something like Vampire Survivors or Holocure. Its pretty standard in that regard. Gather exp on ground, upgrade abilities and stats, the usual. There's "base-building" except not really. You gather resources in the levels and at camp you build houses by pressing a button and then a character is unlocked. That's it. The abilities are cool. Not as many combos to combine weapons as I'd hope. A lot of the weapons are really bad too. Some of them, like the rays, fire in random directions and it feels like half the time they've deliberately aiming where there are no enemies. Some weapons aim where you're looking but for some reason this game doesn't have strafing. The stats info bar is an absolute mess. Doesn't show crit rate, crit damage, attack speed, or any of the attack stats. Co-op is a little buggy too. Things hitting or not hitting when they shouldn't be. It's not terrible, but man I played a different co-op bullet heaven game after beating this one and it was a breath of fresh air. Had everything this didn't. If it weren't for the co-op I would never have played this game. Don't really think its worth the time but pick up on sale if you wanna try it.

This game is great until you reach the end where the amount of monsters and xp dropping makes the game lag and desync. This happens especially when you reach the upgrade screen and exit. The chances of you dying instantly are exorbitant. Also there is no replayability when you beat the game.

one of the best co-op game out there currently imo. great gameplay loop, amazing lvl design, and soundtracks to match. i would encourage everyone to give it a try.

Great music, fun combat and awesome to play with friends. Game could use some additional weapon combos but they are planning to make more.

I hope they fix this because its so close to being good. The co-op feels worse then single player. feels incredibly slow and clunky, in a three player game you get 4-5 options and you all pick one of those and cannot both choose one, this results in no-one getting what they need even when working together. re-rolls are partial Its so upsetting as this game is inches away from being fantastic but ends up feeling incredibly painful to play.

The game is nice and interesting. I do wish we could move the camera or have an upside view since the tilted camera make being hit easier. I was expecting the crafting mechanic to have more depth than just armor (who seem to require only one type of material) and houses (which are one time uses) making foraging a bit useless other than it grants XP. Like most these games we are punished the more we unlock things as more trash clutters the choice pool and the game does not boast of a robust system to banish or favor things. As a tip to the devs: players need weapons at the start. An endless array of small upgrades do not replace extra weapons. I lost more games I care to mention because of being overwhelmed by having one weapon several minutes into the run. We also pretty much only want the upgrade tokens from defeating the last boss, but, for some reason, the game concludes by itself and we're booted out whether we picked them or not. Why? No idea. Either don't do this, or have an automatic magnet pick everything. Same deal with the last boss that triggers a cutscene to the final final boss. Because of the cutscene all upgrade tokens are lost. Unfortunately the game is a tad shallow atm. Not many characters to unlocks, and the crafting idea was strong on paper since we'd not behave like a regular VS game where we just stand there, but rather we run around mining everything. But there is nothing really to do with that except craft some armors which doesn't feel like more than some min-maxing.

I've been enjoying this game a lot with friends. I love how it's a survivors style game where you have to go out and gather materials to upgrade your base and craft gear. My only problem with the game is the scaling as you progress. I feel like whenever you unlock a new area, it's pretty brutal until you get most of your gear upgraded. Overall enjoyable with friends.

As much as I wish I could recommend this game, I cannot do so at the time of this post for the very simple reason that the game does not perform well in its multiplayer. I won't be getting into some of my other concerns in this review -- this is dedicated strictly to how there are consistent issues where overtime, a multiplayer run will gradually desync worse and worse. In all of my time playing this game in multiplayer, I have not once gotten through a multiplayer run without the game devolving into borderline unplayable for anyone other than the host... and it will often perform badly for the host, too. This issue did not rear its head when I tried the demo of this game, and of course this issue doesn't exist in single player. But when your game touts itself as "the wild co-op," you really can't afford to have such drastic issues with the main pull of your game. It's a shame, because I bought this game with the intent to experience it with my friends -- and by now, all of them have given up on the performance of Broventure. Should the developers fix the performance then I will return and update this review, but for now my recommendation is to pass on this game and get something else. (Edited for spelling.)

Co-op is incredibly clunky - it lags constantly causing people to die because the game isn't capable of online play. The weapon system sounds awesome - including having ultimate weapons from combining three maxed weapons. But. The game gives no mechanism to banish weapons and it is almost impossible for both players to get an ultimate weapon. More than once we used every re-roll we could get and still could not get weapons to complete an ultimate. The final boss is the definition of going out with a whimper - you beat the boss at the end of the level and are sent straight to the final boss with no level up/points/anything. And then in the final boss there's not enough experience to bring anyone back if they die and it just is a slow slog to the finish. It was only 3 bucks, but it's hard to say we even got what we paid for.

This games whole deal is that by getting three specific weapons that form a combo, they will combine into a more powerful, legendary version. You can also build yourself to deal a specific type of damage or specific element, and then go for those weapons to go with your build. On paper, this is great and neat. This developers implementation of it though is laughably pathetic. The RNG on weapons is so horrendous you will never be able to build a combo weapon, ever. You'll be lucky to even get the weapons that go with your build. There is no form of bad luck protection or item locking at all, so you can just never see the weapons you want, or sometimes never even see weapons at all. This game would be good if the bad RNG wasn't holding it back. You're already copying everything else from vampire survivors, why not just copy the ability to lock items too?

Fun in single player, but apparently there's multiplayer issues. I will say, the game feels balanced for multiplayer, even in singleplayer mode. But the devs definitely put heart into the game, and it's a shame there's issues. For US$5, I say it's worth it. Definitely worth the $3 sale price. Just be aware of the issues. On a side note, runs fine on the Steam Deck. It's my preferred way to play, even.

It's okay...it gets the job done, but it's a bit slow in the beginning.

Fun game