Recent reviews by Depressed Catfish

Added achievements for a dlc map years after release, that's exactly what we wanted.

Underrated

This game has no right to be so good

I've heard really good things about this game, especially from BaroccoliObama, but unfortunately I was tricked into playing almost 4 hours of a romance roleplaying game.

I like this game, but I just can't recommend it to anyone else. It might not be clear at first, but it has some problems that make this game bloated and unfun to play.

Firstly, instead of building your deck from cards you find along the way, you instead start each run with 3 sets of 4-5 cards each. You technically can switch these out mid run, but only when you unlock a new set. So for almost all the time, you will be doing one run start to finish with the same deck, and no changes.

Each character has 3 different slots for sets of cards, and they have 3 different active item slots. An item will only fit into it's respective item slot, the slots do not share a pool. You start with no active items and only the basic card sets on each character. After you beat a level for the first time, you will unlock something new, either a new active item or a new card set.

There are about 9 different paths to the final boss, (I simplified this) and each path is about 5 levels long. So the strategy is to beat the first level in path 1, and then beat the first level in path 2, until you get enough items or good enough sets to reach a second level. Point being, there is far too much time spent just unlocking things, and the game is balanced around having a good loadout, meaning it's impossible to beat the final boss's without grinding out items first.

This becomes way worse once you see what the levels are like. It's about 7 waves of enemies before fighting the boss wave, and depending on your character and loadout it can take as long as half an hour to clear a full level. That means it takes around 3 hours to fight the final boss, but because you fight the final boss with the exact same loadout you started with, that 3 hours is just using the same strategies each fight with no customization during the run.

Imagine playing Slay the Spire, Griftlands, Monster train, anything like that, but it took 3 hours a run and you did all the customization at the very start of a run. That's this game.

The description sounds amazing, a rouge lite shooter. That's why I played so long, I assumed it would live up to the hype any second, but it never did.

Typically in rouge lites there is risk, but there isn't any risk to be had here. When health doesn't recover naturally then there's a choice of whether to heal or take a risk to get stronger, but that doesn't happen. Typically you can fight harder enemies or choose harder levels for extra rewards but that largely doesn't happen.

You mainly only have one decision to make, whether to leave the level or stay and farm. However, because
enemies difficulty scales with time it ruins that. If you stay to get more items enemies also get stronger, and if you leave early then both you and the enemies are weaker, and that basically means it doesn't matter what you do. Of course theres a way to optimize it, like leaving early on the first few stages and staying longer later, but I find your only major decision being something with a right or wrong answer awful.

A stage consists of 3 things, items, enemies, and a teleporter. Killing enemies gets you gold which gets items (which is basically the only thing that makes you stronger), and the teleporter allows you to start the next stage. Because you need to kill enemies to get gold, and you need gold to items, and because enemies only really spawn over time, it means there is a nearly direct correlation between items and time spent, but because time spent also increases enemies strength there is also a direct correlation between items and enemies with almost zero way to actually get stronger than enemies. And in a rouge lite getting stronger than your enemy is pretty damn important.

Oh, and the shooter aspect is kinda trash too. Theres no weakspots on enemies, and most of them are so big it's impossible to miss. That means most of the harder enemies are just bullet sponges where aim isn't even a factor.

Then there is the dodging aspect of the shooter, and I really hate how that's handled. In most rougelites I've found the dodge is a repeatable action with invincibility frames, but the important part is repeatable. Some survivors you play as have a hefty 10 second movement ability, and some have none. Because some survivors have zero movement abilities every enemy is designed to either have unavoidable attacks or heavily telegraphed attacks that can be walked away from.

There was two ways to handle dodging attacks in this, they can either use a rouge lite dash/dodge, or they can use cover like in most shooters. They opted to do neither, with no dash and no cover.

Very good

Early Access. This game isnt finished yet, but they are cranking out fixes. Just realize that its buggy and missing features, such as saving in the middle of runs and volume

This game sucks. repeatedly get lost. Monsters are boring for first 6 hours atleast

I highly recommend this game. This is not a tower defence and not a first person shooter. It is equally both. Perfect mix. You cant go into this thinking its a tower defence game and write a negative reveiw because of it. Without towers you lose and without help your towers cant win. The most important part is building a proper maze to slow them down long enough for you and your towers to destroy them. The game makes it clear where there going both on the mini map and on your screen. The tower selection is kinda lacking with only 10ish towers. The game doesnt explain the towers very well either so that takes a while to figure out or read a guide. Target managment is a big part of the game. If you kill all the little guys and leave the boss for your towers it might not work well. If you overestimate or underestimate your towers it will be a hard ride. The game is grindy in single player but if you play the rounds in order you level up at the right pace to do the next level for a long time. When I launch the game it sometimes puts steam into offline and I cant find any open lobbies. It is very fun in singleplayer as well. There are no bugs