Blonsters

I'm a sucker for this type of game. The random weapons are a lot of fun and the level variety is great. About a million monster varieties too (haven't come across a single repeat so far.) Starts out easy, gets a looooot harder as you go. Using the mutations to mix up game play is a good touch. Looking forward to future updates.

Blonsters is a unique roguelike movement shooter with a fun gameplay loop. The weapon variety is great with tons of different pieces allowing for lots of interesting weapon combinations, the secrets between levels offer even more pieces for your weapon. The game is fair but the difficulty scaling seems a bit off between hard to extreme difficulty with the jump in special enemy's and their abilities seeming like they should be more gradually introduced. After beating your first run a side room with many new challenges open allowing for a lot of replayability.

Fun, and well polished

I'm writing this after completing my first real run of the game. I defeated the first two bosses and died in the middle of the third area. I played a couple runs before this one but died early in each attempt. Blonsters is an FPS roguelite. The format is pretty simple; you can collect weapons and passive items, levels are made up of consecutive rooms that you have to clear, with a boss at the end, and there's a shop in the middle of each level. The shop uses a temporary resource collected during the run, and bosses drop a meta-resource that can be spent outside of the run to permanently improve your character. Blonsters uses a lot of procedural generation. Weapons, enemies, and levels all appear to be procedurally generated. Enemies generally fall into two types, melee enemies that chase you and ranged enemies that also chase you but will occasionally shoot a projectile at you. I did not encounter any hitscan enemies. Levels seem to be procedurally generated in the sense that there is a pool of rooms the game can draw from for each encounter, but I don't think these rooms themselves are procedurally generated, I think they're all handmade. I might be wrong about that. There are various different weapon types (i.e. hitscan, laser, grenade launcher, shotgun, etc) and each weapon has a passive ability and an active ability. Passive abilities can be things like refunding shots that hit, kills reducing active ability cooldown, etc. Active abilities that I saw were both damage and utility based but most do not relate to the weapon itself. I.e., active abilities would spawn a drone or a turret, mark an enemy to take extra damage, give you a rocket jump, etc. While there is an ammo system and weapons need to be reloaded, all weapons have infinite ammo. Weapons have a rarity system with rarer weapons presumably having stronger stats. However, all the weapons I encountered, no matter how rare, all had one passive and one active ability. The game is very focused on movement and avoidance. The player has a slide, a dash, and a double jump by default and a very large amount of aircontrol. Bunny hopping, unfortunately, does not appear to work (in the sense that bhopping does not by itself build momentum), but it's very easy to build up momentum using the dash or slide and bhopping will preserve momentum rather than slowing you down. All the rooms I played through were very open to accommodate for this playstyle, and even the more cramped ones had a great deal of space available. Enemies deal a large amount of damage when they hit and you are encouraged to avoid being hit thanks to one permanent upgrade giving a bonus when completing a room flawlessly. Each room has an objective you have to complete before you can proceed. Unlike most other games in this genre, there is a decent variety of objectives rather than just killing all the enemies in the room. You may need to destroy a static objective by first killing enough enemies to remove its invulnerability, capture a control point by killing enemies while within a certain radius, or collect items that drop when a specific marked enemy is killed, or just kill all the enemies in the room. Enemies can also spawn as 'elite' variants with special effects. These seem somewhat common by the third stage. The two types I saw were a 'tank' variant, which was much larger and much more durable, and a 'healer' variant, which had an aoe healing effect. Bosses are encountered at the end of each stage The permanent upgrades are each pretty unique and not just simple stat boosts. These upgrades are split into three categories, world, player, and loot, and each has five different upgrades that affect various things under these categories. For example, under the 'player' category you can purchase an upgrade that increases your max health each time you defeat a boss, and under the 'world' category there's an upgrade that affects the spawn chance of special enemies. Each boss defeated appears to drop a single point of currency used to purchase these upgrades, and most upgrades require multiple points to purchase a level. Unfortunately, Blonsters does not feel great to play. While you have a great deal of maneuverability, most of it is based on leveraging your slide and double jump. The slide has an obnoxious screen shake effect attached to it and has no transitional camera animation (i.e. your view instantly jumps from standing to crouching), and double jumping has a forced 'camera dip' effect that quickly becomes very annoying, especially considering how much double jumping you're going to need to do in order to avoid attacks effectively. Your weapon viewmodel is very large and on some weapons the muzzle flash effect when firing, particularly on 'laser' type weapons, can also be very large and obstructive. Recoil as well appears to be mostly camera effects and can also quickly become obnoxious, especially with automatic weapons. There is no way to compare weapon stats outside of dropping both weapons right next to each other and physically looking between their tooltips. Enemies can drop currency when killed to use in the shop, but outside of collecting a specific passive item there is no magnetism on this currency and you must walk directly over each pickup to collect it. Additionally, currency drops are on a timer and disappear if not collected in time. They also are not, for instance, automatically collected when you complete a room. I don't know that I would necessarily call the artstyle bad, but it is not a very pretty game. Animations for both enemies and weapons are very basic, and the enemies themselves mostly just look ugly and grotesque rather than threatening, both as a product of the minimal animations, the cartoonish designs, and the vibrant color pallete used. Most of the game's difficulty comes through attrition. Enemies group up and fire at you en masse while you are attempting to complete a different objective and if you aren't paying attention to incoming attacks you'll get hit. I haven't observed any one-shot attacks but the game is also fairly unforgiving as without upgrades health drops seem very scarce and the only other way to restore health is by purchasing it in the shop, which appears once per stage. Very little of the difficulty comes from having to adapt to a new attack or figure things out on the fly, with only bosses having this type of difficulty; for the regular stages, most of the difficulty is just juggling your circlestrafing while attempting to complete the room objective as fast as possible. Most of the damage I took felt relatively fair. While I don't necessarily know this for certain, it seems like weapon passive and active abilities, as well as the passive abilities you can collect, seem to come from a relatively small pool. In just the few runs I've played at this point, I've already seen multiple repeats of the same weapon passive and active abilities, and all of the passive abilities seem to be fairly simple (i.e. you have more health, you jump higher but take more knockback, you deal more damage but have less health, etc). While it may be possible there are more unique abilities present at higher levels which I simply did not reach, I did not see any evidence of this so far. At the time of writing the list price for the game is $19.99; I purchased it at 25% off as part of an introductory offer. I cannot recommend the game at its current price point, especially when far superior games such as Gunfire Reborn come in at the same list price, or games like Roboquest or Deadzone Rogue at $5 more.