很简单的小游戏但莫名上瘾，画风可爱玩法也很有意思，角色还挺丰富的，但道具再多一点就更好啦

好

I played this with my brother in 2p local co-op and it gave me lots of fun. Despite the simplicity of the store page not having gifs of gameplay moments to fully sell you on it (or the trailer seemingly cutting a bit quick between most shots), I’d like to borrow their statement that this game truly lets you do a “dance of strategy and precision (through gunplay)”. The moment-to-moment game loop of ’timing yourself instead of spam-attacking, to angle your shots in such a way that you evade enemies via recoil while still keeping your combo, and killing a large group of enemies in the process’ ; is nothing short of perfection. It’s always satisfying to pull off certain sequences of kills and evasions; doubly so because these two are tied to each other in this game!

Each weapon works slightly differently, but generally, combos make you stronger, giving you a bigger radius to kill more enemies at once with, and once you’ve practiced enough, you will soon see glorious amounts of firepower to mow down through foes.

It should be obvious, but your boat only drifts depending on your last shot direction and momentum. This is a 2D shooter that doesn’t directly let you move. And hence I do find it perfect as a co-op game or a general party game for sure, because it doesn’t take much learning (or re-learning) to grasp.

Something like Overcooked, in my experience, might be something I play a bit with my bro, let sit in the backlog for 3 months, and then we forget some of the nuances of the mechanic and buttons, or other gameplay tech. So there’s some mental friction on wanting to play it more or boot it up again, because it feels like there’s some need to get-used-to-it again. Over here (heh), you literally just aim and shoot when necessary. It feels perfect for short, impromptu sessions, and the duration of a stage being ~20 minutes reflects that perfectly. (almost always 12-17, tbh)

Don’t let the graphics fool you though! Despite seemingly being a fun, casual arcade game and me saying it’s a nice party game, some of the stages past 1-3 DO get pretty brutal and harder than I expect it to be. The constant upgrades of enemies; by having their properties be combined together could spell your doom, no matter how intuitive it is to know what they will do based on the visuals. Not to mention some of the temporary Stage Events do become a bit RNG-Heavy, particularly how 2-5 starts with 3 random ones out of a pool of effects that are quite devilish.

The boss battles are quite intense and I think the enemies are tightly designed. With that in mind and the fact that this game is sold at 8USD base price, I think it’s an easy steal. I wouldn’t have complained if they sold for 10 honestly, but they took a reasonable decision to play it safe, since some people care too much about numbers and hour-to-dollar. By some metric, this game may seem small, but what’s here shows a level of clever ingenuity that I simply must appreciate. It doesn’t overstay its welcome in terms of stages and enemies it has, and yet the travel through stages felt novel because of how things are spread out.

If they update this game with things I wished were there, then it justifies itself being 10USD. I would buy it as DLC first-day too.

(•)General Playtime: ~10.3h to beat stages 1-1 to 2-5 (all 10) in 2-player co-op. . Of course, your mileage and amount of retries may very depending on how skillful your team is. But I think even if you’re going solo and you play perfectly, it should still at least be 200 minutes (20min x 10stage). Accounting for the fact that you WILL die half the time and retry a bit, I’d say it’s at least a good 5 hours.

But if you’re hunting for the various achievements and the in-game ones too, that’s a different story. There are lots of in-game “stickers” which mark certain achievements, both for solo and co-op. Some of these seem tough and I still have not gotten yet, like the ones wanting you to beat Cthulhu in multiplayer with everyone having a difficulty multiplier of 1.5 or higher or the various unlikely duos of tough characters being played together. Not to mention that each of the numerous characters and the exactly-5-weapons all have markers on which stage outta 10 you’ve cleared with it; a ”true 100%” might take the game up to something like 60-80 hours.

(•)Steam achievements are of fine difficulty. Most are reasonably achievable, since the bulk just wants you to use every character to clear a stage and to clear all stages. Though 4 of them do stand out as especially unique and slightly tougher; and one of them is a secret, but these 4 are cumulatively around 10 hours of grind for me to get solo.

(+) Nice gameplay loop with surprisingly deep tactical action. Already mentioned but recoil-driven shooting truly is a gem of a core game idea. You of course, still need to manually move at times, and that’s where something I call ’recoil-moving’ comes in handy; when your clip is empty, you CAN shoot out blanks, which generally lets you keep your combo multiplier while making small movement adjustments, and this will reset your reload timer unless you have a particular item.

But this mechanic makes many things turn into a double-edged sword in a convention-breaking way. Do you believe reload speed always makes you play better? What about having a bigger gun clip before reloading?. All of these might be always-good-ideas in other games, but not here. These will slowly be detrimental to your ability to be able to recoil-move well, because, respectively, it will give you a smaller time window to reposition yourself while drifting; or you simply can’t recoil-move as much. Upgrades become less of an upgrade and more of a subjective playstyle choice. Sure, if I see one of these in a shop I will buy them, but past a certain point, I sometimes skip these in favor of other items, because I believe I am already playing where I’m comfortable with. 10 Bullets are enough, not 15!

Even tools such as damaging-reload-shockwave item combinations can have their downsides; When enemies can die before you plan them to, you might accidentally want to shoot them and notice too late they’re gone; causing you to miss and lose out on your combo multiplier and the firepower it offers. More offense can make your offense WORSE.

(+) Cleverly designed enemies. As I’ve said, thru your journey you will see enemies slowly upgrade themselves by combining what you’ve seen before, and I feel like that’s very nice. The core designs are simple, but complexity can be found within a smart combination of these characteristics. And the fact their behavior are tied to visuals make them be intuitive. You can see a boss for the first time and beat them; not because they are too easy, but the telegraphing and visuals work wonderfully to let you know what to expect based on enemies you saw.

Let me illustrate (💬, In Comments!)
(+) Music: (7.5/10).

(-) Items could be improved by a bit. 💬
(-) No “Custom Stage” feature. 💬
(-) No “Boss Rush”. I enjoyed the boss fights and would love the ability to quickly jump into fighting all of them, since I’ve enjoyed these kinds of modes in my other favorite roguelites.
(-) Enemies sometimes hide behind shop boats. Visibility issue.
(-) Win screen doesn’t show as much info as I’d like.
(-) Hard to shoot confetti on the win screen once score settles. Unimportant but fun.