Angry Birds roguelite is a solid concept, and you can see the seed of a great game here, but as is I cannot recommend it. It's not absolutely terrible, but it's not engaging enough to justify the price in its current state. The main problem, I believe, is the difficulty or lack thereof. With the amount of resources thrown at you, it would take real effort not to win. The game cribs a lot from Peglin, but when it comes to upgrades it leaves all the guardrails off, and you are constantly thrown enough gold & free relics to just get OPed. There is only one map I've encountered that presents any danger, because you can die from poison if you're not paying attention. Besides that, you can always just take piercing, multishot, and strength options to brute force any screen. The other mechanics, like doing physics based damage with debris, are woefully underutilized. I would love if there was more of a focus on creative problem solving, where you can use the environment to do cool kills, but it doesn't really happen. When it does, it's sort of underwhelming, like the map that's designed to drop boulders on the one enemy's head. It's a cute map, but when you're playing that level with the second unlockable character who DOESN'T DO ANY ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE, it's a slog. (Weird choice for the second available character, too.) Still not dangerous, just boring.
Which also accounts for roughly 10% of every run through. The two levels' maps are unnecessarily huge, and you have to spend time watching your guy run from one end to the other after most encounters. There's no option to speed up or skip these transitions and they just pad an already very long game time. The length of runs might not be a problem if the gameplay was better, my last complete run clocked in at 1:45, but as is it just feels long, like watching a bad movie. Also, there are cut scenes before the two boss battles which are always the same, and long. I think you can speed them up by button mashing, but there's no option to skip them and just another example of not respecting the player's time.
Final nitpicks:, the arrow variety isn't there. If you're roguelite jam is making crazy builds, it's not going to happen. You can do OP builds with multishots and piercing, but there's nothing that's going to make you go, "Wow, I wasn't expecting that." Tooltips could be a little more helpful. They're well done when you hover over enemy icons, but they don't activate on the different platform types explaining what they do, and they should. Why are there two different green platforms? There are more colors available, it's a bad choice and confusing.
On the plus side, the game looks great. The art is really well done and it's well animated. Technically, I only hit a minor softlock problem a couple of times, and the second time I cleared it by clicking somewhere, so it might not have been a bug at all, just poor UI telling the player where or what to click.
The game does have potential, but it would take a lot of work and the dev would have to put a lot more work in. I'll be watching for updates and hopefully change my review if the game improves. Score: 2/5
