Recent reviews by Eizo

It's pretty, grindy, and quite boring.

Interesting ideas with how the different weapons work, but completely pointless and uninspired when it comes to any kind of ability/skill/perk build during a run. Doesn't matter what you pick really, nothing spectacular will happen, you will end the run playing the same way as you began it.

And so grindy. Do the same maps over and over for some crafting material so you can upgrade a weapon or armour piece, same old same old as in other games, the fault here is that the gameplay loop is grindy and boring in itself.

Oh, and you don't really need to get better at playing the game, or I mean you can't get much better at it, the skill ceiling is quite low. Instead you can take on harder versions of the monsters because you have grinded and upgraded your kit to deal or mitigate some more damage.

It's like playing Diablo using only the barbarian and only his basic attack, and then after you have played a stage five times or w/e, you can get a sword that gives you +1 dmg so you can do another stage number of times to get yet another new sword that gives you +2, and so on.

filler text

For the Emperor / Blood God / Greater Good / WAAAGH!

Fraught with poor design choices.

Examples 1; press the button once, to reroll a weapon choice once, but the game lets you waste all your rerolls as if you pulled the trigger on a machine gun.

Example 2; you die and get the choice between Revive and Surrender (or give up or w/e it's called), but there is no grace period or dead time zone, for button presses so if you were dodging and dashing when you died, your button presses will carry over into the death menu = the selection marker moves all over and you end up choosing "Give Up" even though you can still revive.

Alot of other general jankiness as well, but overall it's too frustrating to play, waste of my time even if it's free.

Decent to good music though, and I like the art style. But the gameplay is a thumbs down.

It's a good game, better than most others in this genre of horde, or swarm survival bullet fests. And it's free. Nice.

On a side note, I think the term roguelike has been watered down so much and been attached to so many types of games, that it has pretty mush lost it's meaning. Arcade style game, or something along that line, would be a better fit for many so called roguelikes or roguelites. Or perhaps Call of Duty, Half Life, and Counter Strike are all Doomclones?

Very good game. Will / Might rewrite a better review later on.

One of the most boring clones of Vampire Survivor. This genre of games isn't really deep or mentally engaging to begin with, but this game isn't even trying to do anything else than stacking stats. It also contains several strange or straight up bad design choices. There are better ways to waste your time.

Seems to be bugged to bits. Can't play the game. When I press "Start Mission" am placed in a hangar to prepare for the first mission, the game decides to hide the cursor and enter annoythecrapoutofyou-mode by not cooperating in any way. Alt+F4 becomes the sole solution.

Play it with CRT filter on for rad vibes, man.

The biggest challenge this game throws at you, is figuring out what is actually what, on the screen.
Your summons and the enemies share the same same palette, and are shaded in the same way, not even using inverted coloring to tell them apart, or having some be opaque, if they are so adamant about using so few different hues. The sprites all exists one the same layer as well, so sprite and pixel gore is unavoidable.

The second challenge is against the controls, specifically if using handheld controller/gamepad. This game is NOT full controller compatible, you MUST to use the mouse in some cases when going through the menus. But the biggest issue is the drifting, oh boy. This game makes the analog stick on my 8BitDo SN30 pro+ act all kinds of crazy, especially in menus, but the aiming recticle moves about by itself, if ever so slightly, while playing. You better not have any impairment or disability if you want to play this game. There is also no button or key remapping.

Even with these glaring issues, the game is fairly easy. I guess that's why it's so popular, you can feel powerful even if you are a game journalist.
There is an achievement for completing a full round without taking a hit, which I got quite early on. And that was without using a 100% dodge build (yes, that's a thing), or the invincible deerserker character. Playing this game makes me feel more like I'm content cruisng (which there is little of) and grinding, than actually playing. It's more of a chore and a time dump, churning out achievement after achievement, than something enjoyable. The various builds you can create from level ups, all amass to the same "Meh..".

20 Minutes till Dawn, is Vampire Survivors without the dopamine triggers and the secrets it has.