Battle Shapers

I will preface by saying I've never had a game run as smooth and at such great consistent high quality settings on my PC without any stuttering or other issues. Kudos to the programmers for pulling that off. HOWEVER, the game has no idea what it wants to be. The grind to unlock new weapons feels like something straight out of a microtransaction-filled mobile game since the ability to level up your base stats by meager numbers is tied to the same currency you use to unlock new weapons to find on your run. Do you want to have decent health or do you want to be able to use a new gun that you need to buy to unlock? If you want to have both you need to keep replaying the same maps over and over, fighting the same enemies over and over and over, with the same weapons over and over and over, and the random map puzzles can lock you out of loot when you least expect it if you don't have split second decision-making which forces you to memorize different hallways when they spawn so you don't soft-lock your run from loot. On the note of speed, there are times that it feels like the game wants you to go fast because of the timer on your HUD and the existence of dash resets but your momentum is capped. There's barely any build variance for speed and it feels more awkward with their DOOM 2016 inspired takedown system that wants you to melee enemies at low health for shield regeneration as the only base way of healing while slowing down time the moment you do EVERY time you do it without I-frames which, when paired with the awkward momentum, begs the question of how slow or fast this game wants you to take it especially when this play style punishes you for overkilling enemies with your guns which are the main selling point for build construction; another thing this game does horribly. You can choose to rip modifiers from guns to attach to one you have at the cost of losing that gun for either use as is or for scrap (the currency used within a run) which SOUNDS cool until you realize not all modifiers work for all guns. Yes, you can't build a fun build in a genre about making fun builds. This game would have been better if it was a contained campaign like ULTRAKILL with a roguelite side-mode, but instead we get something that distinctly misunderstands why ULTRAKILL, DOOM 2016, and roguelite games are popular. Even with my short playtime, it somehow failed to feel fun to replay despite being a roguelite wherein replaying IS the point. It's by far the worst feeling first-person roguelite I have ever played, and despite how polished it is, it's mechanically terrible and feels like wasted potential.

7,5/10 A very good roguelite shooter strangely similar to Roboquest in its theme. But despite the likeness, Battle Shapers offers a sufficiently different experience. The gameplay is very good, visually impactful and very responsive. There are ranged weapons but there is also a melee attack. And it's well made, I enjoyed the animation, and the slight slow motion when your punch finish off an enemy. And this melee attack is not just for show, it has many usages. The character is also greatly agile. Melee robots, homing bullets, explosions, ... everything can be dodged. The character can dash and wall jump. Aside from rooms filled with robots there are also areas with parkour sections dedicated to these movements. Battle Shapers suffers from the same little flaw as Roboquest, but here it's worse. When the game is launched for the first time, it's very bare-bone. Most of the content must be unlocked, there is only half a dozen of gun, no special ability, etc... Between each run, there is a currency that can be spent to unlock more weapons, auxiliary items (grenade and more) or permanently upgrade your stat. For most items, to be unlockable, you must find their respective data first. They are located in hidden places, or sometimes dropped by robots. Sadly, many of the new weapons unlocked weren't as efficient as the first weapons. There are 4 cores to unlock permanently by fighting bosses. Each time a run is started it's possible to chose between these cores to obtain a special ability (shield, magnetic bomb, etc...) and they can also change the aspect of the other abilities: the punch become a claw, or it can launch air discs, or now double jump is possible, etc... And during each game these special abilities can be upgraded with different modifiers. Even weapon also have modifiers (multi-shot, pierce, etc) that can be switched between weapons. And if the final boss is defeated at least once, it's now possible to add modifiers to the difficulty. Yep, modifiers are everywhere! The second little flaw of Battle Shapers, is that each game doesn't differ much from the previous one. As a roguelite shooter, the random element is not much present. Each game, it's the same four bosses and the same four levels to beat. But the different special abilities and the various modifiers present in every aspects of the game ensure a good replayability. In order to reach the true end the game has to be finished at least 5 times at 5 different levels of difficulty. So there is a story, and it comes with few cutscenes and dialogs, but don't expect something very developed. I had one annoying bug after around 12 hours, which completely reset my story progression while keeping my meta progression intact. In other words, I had to reexperience every dialogs and cutscene from the beginning. The device to spend currency between each game was locked, as was the one for choosing difficulty modifiers. However, I was able to keep my unlocked weapons, stats, and difficulty modifiers as they were before the bug. Finishing the game once more fixed almost everything. By the way, a successful game is between 1h30 and 2h, or less if you ignore the optional rooms, or even less if you die ;)

Battle Shapers if a Fun FPS Action Roguelike. The story isn't deep, but the game mechanics are. It's Not a perfect game, but it's a Fun game that I jump into whenever I want to relax. Worth the price. Once you get past the first couple of hours and attempts, the game mechanics grow and grow. Lots of well developed mechanics. Everything isn't given to you right from the start. You gain new abilities and the progression is paced out really well where nothing gets stale or boring. There are a seemingly endless variety of abilities, upgradeable weapons, and tools to unlock. The possibilities and combinations are well designed. The gunplay and movements are fast, fluid, and fun. At first I didn't know if I would like the art style. But I find it fresh and light. Possible endless replay ability. I picked this up on sale $10, it was definitely worth the price I paid. Very Playable on the Steam Deck at lower setting. Supports controllers just fine. But just like most FPS games, I found it best played with a keyboard and mouse.

Battle Shapers is a difficult one to provide a general recommendation for, on the basis that I feel a large portion of this game's design is unintentionally antagonistic to casual players. If, you’re well-versed in FPS roguelites and are looking for something fast-paced and challenging, then I would recommend it, and you’re likely to get 15-20 hours of solid, fun runs. I’ve had a lot of fun and the game was 100% worth it for me - despite what my list below might suggest - but this review is more tailored for those sitting on the fence. If you’re not accustomed to FPS# like this, then it will likely come down to where you sit on the “how much difficulty is enough” scale. [h2] General Overview [/h2] Many reviewers are comparing this to RoboQuest - which is my favourite FPS roguelite - and, to be blunt, this game feels like the dev saw RoboQuest and said: “What if we do that, but different”. The gunplay is similar, the art style for story sections is similar, and the general “feel” when playing is similar, but it doesn’t quite hit the same mark. The game is very repetitive, more so than in roguelites, due to the same map structures, limited-feeling builds, a limited pool of bosses, and the way runs are structured. Start a run → clear a tonne of similar floors/rooms -> beat all 3 bosses → fight final boss. The second video on the store page showcases the gameplay well enough. It really is as it looks - snappy, fast-paced, cognitively demanding, and with a fairly detailed meta-progression system to keep adding new things. So what about this is antagonistic? [h2] The Antagonistic Elements [/h2] The game gets progressively harder, both in the meta sense of making runs more challenging, but also mid-run. If you want to finish the game, this is non-negotiable: you have to keep increasing the difficulty, and it will get harder as the run progresses. On top of this, several factors contribute to that feeling of an inflated challenge beyond sheer skill. Give the below a read and consider whether these would bother you enough to drop the game. If not, I recommend you pick it up. [list] [*] I’ve done 7 runs, and in those runs, I’ve won 4 times and am currently at the final difficulty. In these runs, I haven’t had a reroll. I was given one, but the first tier of difficulty took it away from me, as it was the most logical choice to pick. This happens with other unlocks. Just paid to have reduced trap damage? Nice! Now, how about you get dealt an extra 25% anyway so you can progress. Want more rerolls? Well, buy the machine for 500, then pay more for more rerolls on top of that instead of unlocking things. [*] Continuing on the difficulty element, each difficulty increase requires more of these selected. Unlike, say, Hades, where you fine-tune enemy buffs or your limitations, or even RoboQuest, where each difficulty focuses on increased enemy challenge, here, it’s almost all comes down to making yourself weaker. Sometimes, as already noted, by decreasing things you’ve actively paid meta-progression currency for. So, not only are runs getting harder, but difficulty in mid-runs gets harder (boss locations receive more dangerous buffs), and you’re also getting weaker. [*] My quickest winning run was my most recent at 1:21:45. Longest at 1:38:52. On average, runs are an hour an half. Which [i] feels [/i] too long. Run fatigue sets in real quick at the 1-hour mark when enemies get more spongy, rooms start to blend into one another, and the knowledge that one slip of focus could mean you’ve thrown the run and that time investment. You can leave midway through, but progress only saves at the start of a floor. [*] You get four main cores, which you can think of as classes. The first, I would consider the worst by far, but the others you only unlock after beating the respective boss. then, to upgrade the core and have more build/room choices, you have to continue beating the bosses. Ultimately, this boils down to a slow introduction of arguably the more fun elements to combat, as it takes 2-3 runs to really get the progression started, BUT also means if you’re not someone consistently completing runs, your ability to actually experience this core component of the game takes even longer. [*] Later in runs and higher difficulties, more and more enemies become corrupt, essentially having a shield or element-specific shield. On the one hand, it's cool; it requires you to think about what weapons you’re choosing to get through these more effectively, or just use Kinetic, which bypasses the damage reduction slightly. On the other hand, if you don’t have either, things are a slog. Toward the end of runs, enemies can become so spongy that regardless of what you have, they take ages to kill. [/list] There are also some in-run random things that can also cause frustration. For example, when bosses interrupt mid-room to make it more challenging, your map vanishes, and enemy health bars vanish for seemingly no reason. Additionally, you can’t click and hold to continuously shoot some guns, even if they don’t have a charge? Or if you go to apply a mod to a gun only to find out it won’t work on the gun you want, which you couldn’t know beforehand, you have to scrap it instead of being able to choose another reward. Small stuff, but in the realm of a roguelite, which can get repetitive quickly, the small stuff soon adds up. [h2] Tips if You Decide to Give It a Try [/h2] Nothing really to spoil that hasn’t been shown by the devs. Some random tips I think could come in handy if you want a more streamlined start/time: [list] [*] [b] DO NOT BUY META PROGRESSION ITEMS IF YOU PLAN TO QUIT: [/b] When you finish a run, the obvious thing to do is spend your currency, then quit, right? Well, when you buy skills and weapons, one will drop, so you can immediately use it on a run. If you do this and quit out, they vanish and aren’t there when you next start. [*][b] Ignore the home base teleporter: [/b] You unlock this early, and it lets you skip the introductory rooms. It saves like… a minute or two, and you miss out on 2-3 rewards. Not worth doing. [*] [b] Wind → Strike → Volt: [/b] Will make sense if you play. By far the easiest route for all runs. [*] [b] Don’t buy everything [/b]: Anything you buy gets added to the loot pool. Goes without saying that if there’s something you absolutely wouldn’t want to use (I despise charge-based weapons), just don’t buy it. [/list] And, of course, have fun if you do play!

DO NOT BUY. Sweet Baby Inc touched this game. There are a lot of good ideas, but few of those ideas were executed in a manner that makes a game truly great. Far too many systems are locked behind progression, meaning the initial impression of the game is that it's a bland FPS with an unnecessarily tacked-on roguelite skin. Meta-progression is irritating, as whole systems are again locked behind death instead of just adding an increased weapon/skill variety. Boss and enemy design prioritize bullet-sponge over skill expression, and the variety between enemies is severely lacking. Each of the three main bosses are effectively just boiled down to the same attacks with different skins, essentially just 'jump the hazard', 'sidestep the hazard', and 'kill the minions'. Weapons aren't particularly interesting either, you're mostly just going to be using some type of machine gun with an elemental coat of paint put over it. Maybe something will change when I'm deeper into it, but a game really shouldn't take 10h to get good. Edit follows: Nah. It's missing one of the most important things for a roguelite: Excitement. You never pick up an item and think "Oh, this is THE run!" You never get those rush moments because your end of run capabilities aren't much more interesting than what you started with. Depth of a cookie sheet. Also, if you're going to require a 'don't get hit' mentality from your players, you have to have sound and visual design good enough to warrant that level of expectation. If you want to have firing methods based on timing, do NOT slow down actions without warning. You can't demand perfection if you're not going to offer it yourself. Oh and it loses frames like you wouldn't believe once you're anywhere deeper than the first couple difficulty levels. RE2 Remake typically leaves my temps around 42-45c, but Battle Shapers averages high 50s to low 60s, which is unforgivable, given the visual style.

its very good

A big surprise. I don't know how i missed this one. Great gun play, fun art style and roguelite elements.

eu gostei, mt bom

It's good enough to be a fine game to spend a bunch of time on, but has a whole lot of small issues that prevent it from being a great game. I'd say that for the most part, you get the majority of enjoyment out of finishing the game once, and going through the gauntlet of difficulty increases to the true ending is not worth it.

I've barely played but I think I can give the game a cautious recommendation. Fun for my brief time and I enjoyed the vivid visual style. I had one small gripe that was weird performance hangs. Dying to my first boss encounter because the game lost a full second was... not lit but I don't know if that's a regular issue or a random one off. I had one large gripe that was the cutscene text. You have two choices. Sit and wait for the slowest text dialogue delivery in the history of games or to skip all dialogue entirely. Why can't I just get the next box as soon as I want? I can read faster than the text appears, I don't want to wait another 10 seconds for 6 more words to appear. Is the literacy crisis really this bad?