Rebirth is an amazing game! It improved on flash Isaac in almost every single way you can imagine and has served as a platform for a lot of new content to be added to the game. People have strong opinions about the way the game has developed since its release, but there's no denying that Rebirth itself was a slam dunk and a grand slam. One of the best roguelites ever made, and a huge inspiration for other developers in the genre ever since.

This game's greatest strength is its replayability and sustaining value. It may be one of the highest hour-to-dollar ratios in single-player gaming.

If you are the kind of gamer who reacts to a difficult challenge with a determination to conquer it, you will love the way this game continues to challenge, and challenge, and challenge further.

If you are the kind of gamer who goes into a game looking for suprises and discovery, you will be continuously pleased every time you find a cool new room, a game-changing item, crazy synergies between those items, and the games plaethora of well hidden secrets.

If you are the kind of gamer who loves to hunt achievements, this game will not only please you with the gargantuan number of achievements on display, but also in how the game integrates them with the core gameplay, rewarding you with in-game unlocks for almost every single achievement.

If you are the kind of gamer who just wants a game they can turn on whenever, wherever, and enjoy a short but enjoyable gaming session, this game is perfect. If you are in this category, buy it on the Switch if you have one.

If you are the kind of gamer that likes more casual experiences, that becomes very disheartened by dying or losing, is squeamish around gross imagery, or who doesn't want to have to look things up online, then you might find this game doesn't suit your tastes. One feature common amoung content rich games like this, Don't Starve or Minecraft is that they are often very hard to penetrate due to their emphasis on experimentation and unexplained features, requiring wiki usage, and other McMillen games like Super Meat Boy often deter those that justifiably claim "This game is too hard" or "This game is gross!" While very fun and rewarding to the kinds of gamers listed above, and highly recommended, do beware that if you are in this category, I do not recommend this game.

i would like to drive isaac to mcdonalds and buy him a happy meal

The most fun you can legally have with a naked child in your basement

My first attempts at The Binding of Isaac resulted in me repeated dying in the first room I entered. Almost 2000 hours later in game I can now sometimes survive as the lost. Despite the frustration of dying A LOT, the challenge of getting further and further in game was what kept me returning day after day. Two years later it is still my most commonly played game.

With this many hours of enjoyment I feel like a review is long overdue.


Music - 5/5

I absolutely love the soundtrack for this game and it complements the theme of the game. Each floor has it's own unique tracks and ambient sounds which give a great atmosphere.

Standout tracks: Delirum, Diptera Sonata & Ascension (Chest Fight)



Graphics - 3/5

This is very much down to personal taste - I originally played the flash version of Binding of Isaac and once Rebirth came out with the pixel graphics I immediately hated it. It felt like a lot of the charm was gone. The art style has grown on me over time but I do still miss the old graphics.



Playability - 5/5

Giving this game any less than a 10 for me is impossible. In about 2000 hours I've run into a couple of bugs but rarely have they caused me to lose a run. The only memorable on is when using Dead Cat on a Sacrifice room it caused the game to crash but I've not had that occur in quite some time.

The controls were initally hard for me to get used to but they are simple and you do get used to them fairly quickly. I use a keyboard but have attempted the game with a controller but I found it a bit odd after having played so much of the game with the keyboard. Some friends have found it easier with controller when starting but I suppose that comes down to personal preference.


TOTAL: 13/15

The Binding of Isaac is fun (albeit, hard at times) game with a lot of charm. It's given me quite literally thousands of hours of enjoyment.

I hate The Bloat

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is a remake of Binding of Isaac with new graphics, new mechanics, new monsters, new items and every aspect of the game has been enhanced. New content has been added everywhere possible, the game feels infinitely smoother, is so much nicer to play, and has many more hours of content to keep you satisfied for longer. If you enjoyed the original Binding of Isaac, Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is going to be infinitely better and I can promise instant satisfaction. This review will consist of comparisons between the original and Rebirth, what’s good, what’s bad, possible changes and just an overall look at various aspects of the game including everything that comes to mind. It is often a bit rambly, because I talk extensively about every detail I like and every component that irks me. For a full recommendation of the game and a continuation of the review, visit the last paragraph.

A basic introduction to Binding of Isaac overall is an attempt to run away from your Mother who is trying to kill you. You run into the basement, where you find various items which can be beneficial, harmful or simply useless to your overall goal of surviving. You shoot the enemies with your tears to kill them while running away from them and their tears to avoid taking damage. Once you die, that run is over. The game is perma-death, so you have to start again from scratch. The game is also absolutely disgusting. There isn’t too much blood, but knowing that these monsters have lived in your dusty old basement, been transformed into ugly mutilated creatures and that this is what becomes of you as you take pills and pick up items is gross. Once you get past the horrid enemies, the game is pretty simple and is extremely fun to all who like the challenge of a game like this..

This game has a bunch of different characters, all of which have different unique aspects. Some characters are easier to play than others, which in the eyes of many people, makes those characters more fun. I wish the characters were more balanced, but it’s very rarely possible to have 10 different characters you can play as that all play with equal difficulty. There are bound to be some easier, more fun and more interesting characters, and that’s what makes them unique. Something that’s missing from the classes however, is all the characters being unique. Some of the playstyles of the characters feel too similar, and some of the things that made characters unique in the original Binding of Isaac have disappeared in Rebirth.

Samson no longer starts with a soul heart along with 1 red heart, an interesting aspect of Samson that made him a challenge in the original game. Rather, he starts with 3 red hearts, probably to accompany the change in the item of Bloody Lust making it a damage output increase relative to the amount of damage taken for the entire floor. This is an interesting change, but it makes Samson more of a tanky character, similar to Magdalene, rather than the weaker character with more potential. I believe a better change would have been to give Samson a spacebar item and keep his stats the same as they are in the original, and the effect of Bloody Lust relative to the amount of kills you get while still maintaining it’s effect over the floor.

Lucky Foot, the item that made Cain a fun character to play in the original, has been significantly nerfed, making Cain a character that lacks a truly unique aspect. While Lucky Foot is still a luck up, a single luck increase does not have much of an effect as most items that use luck to work require a lot of it to work extremely well. If the Lucky Foot could still make the Fortune Machine work all the time, or at least most of the time, and increase the luck stat by multiple points rather than just one, Cain would be a much more interesting character to play and much more unique.

A good addition to Rebirth is that all the stats are finally given good use and are recorded. The luck stat is used in everything it should, with a bunch of items now using the luck stat to perform more efficiently, all methods of gambling in the game being affected by luck and it now being shown on the pause screen when you press escape. They’ve also shown all the stats, including shot speed and luck as previously mentioned, on the pause screen, which were not there in the original game.

There are some enemies in the game that have been made impossible to fight. Bloat is a boss that shoots brimstone like lasers out of his eyes, which wasn’t too bad in the original but in this game there is no ‘tell’ (something that means he’s going to do a certain attack) for when he is going to shoot it, and before you can move out of the way, there is a laser and you’ve been hit. The same thing applies to the Lumps in the womb and the Mom eyes in the red champion Mom fight, which shoot instantly upon popping up and you have no time to react to the high speed shot. There are a lot of enemies that do similar things, and still a lot of rooms remain where it’s almost impossible to leave without taking damage.

Something I noticed that’s new in Rebirth is that everything from the original now has an equivalent. Every form of fly-related enemy now has a spider version that does the same thing, and a lot of similar aspects like that. It makes the game more uniform, because now there are a lot more interesting spiders which were missing from the original game and a lot of new versions of both flies and spiders which add a lot to the challenge of learning new elements of the game.

Easily one of the best new additions in Rebirth is the ability to save your progress in a run. You can stop it at any time, close the game, and start again from where you left off at a later point. You can’t start another run while in the middle of a previous one without overriding the previous run’s data, but it’s still an extremely useful feature, since in the previous game we had to leave the game running to continue a round of BoI.

One of the more fun new additions is rooms of varying sizes. They aren’t anything like a random size, but they can now be a single normal room, as all the rooms were in the original BoI, they can be double rooms extended either horizontally or vertically, and they can even be quadruple rooms that extend in both directions. The animation for travelling through such rooms can apparently cause motion sickness, and it can be turned off by changing something in one of the files (I’m not quite sure what). Personally, I quite like the animation, and it makes moving around large rooms extremely fun.

Overall, this game is easily worth the $15 if you liked the original Binding of Isaac, and at the time of the making of this review there was no DLC released (if there ever will be any), so that might be added in the future. This is an action packed perma-death roguelike with infinite replayability and hundreds of hours of gameplay to unlock all the achievements and secrets. As Steam limits the size of community reviews, you can find the rest of my review here[1drv.ms].

In the rest of the review, I go over:

• Synergies
  
• Chained/Boarded Rooms
  
• Ludovico Technique
  
• Boss Rush rooms
  
• Multiplayer

this happened to my buddy Eric

Dear Eddie,

Well what is there to say?

You started as a young lad on a documentary, sketchbooking your way to a game called Super Meat Min.

From there, you opened up the old Adobe flash, and made a little ditty called Isaac. Some called it Zelda, others called it Eddie's Special.

Fast forward 10 years plos plos, here we are. A finished product that they will send in orbeez to a moon base one day. Not because it is a dopamine delivery service. But it is a dopamine story service. The stories in Isaac are all around you, if you believe.

Edwin, thank you for making a canvas of a game, that allows pogs to be thrown at it from every angle, and no matter who is looking at it, they see something different.

Some call it tinted, we call it tainted.

Thank you for the masterpiece. It will always be remembered in our horts.

If you have never played this game, and like fun things that are fun, you owe it to yourself to give it the old spin of the D6....plus you never know what you may end up with, which is part of the allurance.

Love,

R Key

what no father figure does to mf