Bulletmancer

Design left me cold after 9 minutes of the full version, which, curiously, felt worse in both difficulty and feel over the demo. Refunded immediately. A miss that was almost on target imo. Number one design feature I hate is the stop shooting to get xp part, which feels so terrible that I do not want to stockholm myself into a psuedo good time by exposure. Pass pass pass.

Its enjoyable for what it is, $5 to kill some time. Overall its an incredibly grindy game, 3 maps with a relative amount of enemy diversity, however by the time your run really gets going nothing on screen matters. There's a little bit of build diversity, but the different builds don't feel super unique from one another. A few of the characters seem outright overpowered compared to the others, one that starts with lifesteal and another with increased base Crit Chance and Crit Damage. The Faerie Collector might also be pretty strong with the Meta Upgrade that increases faerie spawn rates. A lot of the stat achievements seem somewhat difficult to obtain as there aren't a lot of ways to improve those stats outright and the percentage multipliers make you require like 10+ upgrades of specific items to hit them. Its also completely arbitrary since the difficulty is trivialized way before you hit those points. It took around 6 hours to unlock all items and complete a run with every character, there's only 1 item I've never seen in the entire game and I'm not sure why it never came up. I think its locked behind an upgrade path but the other item in its path is pretty strong and I picked it up many times. Item balancing is kinda nonexistant. Some items are always good or downright broken and other items are just kinda there. The Elemental and Nature affinities (the only two featured in the game) are pretty lackluster and while theres an achievement for collecting all of one affinity in a run, it requires a decent amount of luck and subpar building since the Nature affinity has some of the least useful items in the game and the Elemental items are all over the place. There's also barely a reroll feature (you get one reroll and the starting character gets 3 total) and no way to lock/banish items you don't want which isn't a problem at all because the game isn't very hard but it makes me wonder why the rerolls were put in here to begin with. Minibosses drop special Relic items which was a cool way to introduce strong build items but there's only like 6 of them and they don't help your build diversity at all. Its just a matter of do you want to shoot faster, have more bullet damage, or get some HP/regeneration at the cost of another stat. Overall for what its worth I think the game has value, I just wish there were more depth instead of the diversity being spread out at a surface level. I didn't manage to see all the meta progress options, as that system is super grindy and also barely exists. There's 2 Trees with 2 descening branches each and I think 4 levels on each side with one Ultimate skill at the bottom. The offensive one seems irrelevant and is based on monsters killed in the run, except there's no way to track how many monsters you've killed in the run (or after the run). I don't know what the last 3 skills in the Defensive/Utility tree are and maybe I never will.