This roguelike action sidescroller has something that’s right up my alley: tiny pixel art sprites! Also, I had some great chaotic runs playing co-op with my brother.
This is a game I have often requested when visiting my brother, as a local co-op experience. It’s the kind of roguelike where you accrue many special items and modifiers over the course of a run, stacking and stacking them until you’re a hyperactive sci-fi juggernaut. However, with more time spent playing, the enemies also steadily increase in power as denoted by the gauge on the side of the screen.
A run consists of choosing a character, all with very different playstyles thanks to their four key abilities (lucky for me, my bro had put in a fair bit of work to unlock most of them; I settled on the Huntress, with the occasional Chef or Commando). Then you explore a series of levels to get to a teleporter and fight a wave of monsters, all with their own quirks. After several levels and when you think you’re ready you can choose to proceed to the final level and boss.
The rising difficulty slider encourages constant movement, to progress. Within a level you make money from kills, which are spent to get items from shrines and chests: these are the chaotic element for your character’s growth. Finding effective item combinations and exploiting them to break the game… is the point of the game, and it’s great fun, even more so when you unlock a permanent toggle to make your own choice from item drops.
Monsters and item locations are random, but the level layouts are not. There’s a finite number of stages you’ll get sent to, and this can become a stale element over repeated plays. A run can also take a while to complete, and be slow to start. Getting to that point of a bombastic, nonsensically kitted-out character blowing up crowds of swarming baddies is the true highlight of the game, but it absolutely won’t happen every time. This is the nature of roguelikes I suppose, with frustrating randomness and starting from scratch every time.
But it’s worth it, I think. There are just so many crazy possibilities, and exploring and clearing out levels successfully is satisfying. The miniscule on-screen characters is a good thing for me: it does add to the confusing messiness when things start to heat up, but being able to see so far around the screen is a great boon, and I do appreciate the minimalism of the character design. We had a lot of good times here with the occasional insane god-run, or otherwise trying obscure tasks for unlocks. Take a risk on this one (yeah I’m cool, I did a cool tagline).
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astro-7 liked this schistostega-pennata said: RoR2 is really neat too you should check it out if u enjoyed the first one!!
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