EDIT, May 3rd, '22: First off, holy carp, I got a dev reply. Second, off, wait, highest rated?? Nifty.
Third and way more important than all the nonsense and waffling: an actual update to my review after sinking a bunch more time into the game today (around two hours at time of writing this edit) and finally reaching, although not [i]beating[/i] wave 50.
To start with (and in direct response to that reply below), while I don't agree that 'every single facet of the game' has been improved and don't know that I agree it's even been redone unless that means back-end work, I [i]will[/i] agree that things have been updated and mixed around. I don't know what the nuke is, and the discipline thing seems....meh. Anyway, is it enough to flip my review to a positive one?
Erm, no; the fundamental statement that the game is basically a slot machine hasn't actually changed. Enemies still spawn in random patterns and the gun still ignores your pitiful wishes that it would shoot the thing coming up the center lane when it's busy lavishing the walls above and below with storms of fire and ice. Losing still feels like the game rolling a die and deciding to destroy you, rather than you failing to play the game well because it's [i]all[/i] still RNG-based; there's no skill in the game failing to give you anything you can use.
The Desired/Undesired system has apparently been totally reworked, but putting things in the 'desired' box still didn't make them come up any more often that I noticed—likely because there's so many items that [i]can[/i] drop that the drop rates are all terrible—although the 'undesired' box did successfully cause all of a particular weapon to entirely vanish from the game, which I admit is the desired outcome, so....progress?
And speaking of drops, it's [i]still[/i] a constant and unrelenting spam of one-star parts you don't need and can't use that, along with the two and three star parts you could, don't drop in large enough numbers to upgrade, even ignoring that some of the parts added with recent updates are blatantly [i]worse[/i] at two-stars compared to using two single-star parts, to the point that using one less gun slot doesn't actually make up for it.
Anyway, moving on. Boss freeze immunity has been reworked, instead of being a flat imperviousness to the effect, freeze now lasts about as long as it takes for a three-star knockback to shove the boss back.... Which means there's still little point in including it, and since the drop rate on the freeze effect seems to have been reduced quite a lot, that's probably just as well, 'cause you won't be finding it anyway.
Next, next, next.... Oh, yes, the grasshopper enemy! Gods be praised, for it seems to be fixed and no longer hangs out in the back half of the map needlessly drawing out your waves. This is very good, and I was quite pleased to see it. I was [i]less[/i] pleased to see that the behaviour is replicated by [i]another[/i] enemy, the ridiculously fast-moving porcumouse-thing. It's a red mouse with spikes and a silly name that I don't recall off the top of my head, and it has a routine tendency to enter the map....and then turn one-hundred eighty degrees and run right the heck back off the map again, in a game where enemies on the right side of a line on the right side of the field are immune to damage.
And finally, the petty complaint. The damage numbers complaint: You can see your damage numbers now! Sort of. What you can see is the damage you're doing to enemies and it's hidden in the options screen. So, bit of an issue here (only seeing them in-wave is one, but) if you can't see them between waves, how do you tell at a glance that your gun is better without maybe losing the game to find out?
In closing: still a slot machine; still nothing like flash-based wave defence games of old; still have high hopes for it becoming something awesome; can't recommend.
[i]Original review below:[/i]
It's an interesting game, and the premise is sort of cool, but the absolute and total lack of player agency means that you're seldom going to actually see any of the possible cool combos. To start with, it's a [i]wave defence[/i] game, not a [i]tower defence[/i] game. There are no towers; you're just upgrading a single gun for a given value of 'upgrading'.
Regardless of what it looks like, this is basically a slot machine. RNG has full governance over what you [i]can[/i] put in your gun, and then it has full governance over the pattern in which enemies spawn, and [i]then[/i] it has total control over where your gun even fires and it feels utterly infuriating to have an enemy your gun absolutely can oneshot make a completely unharassed bull rush right up the center of the 'map' because your gun isn't firing on the center lanes. Or worse, in the waves between fifteen or so and thirty, where it just stops firing on trajectories able to hit the bottom third of the 'map', so if you don't have enough bounce enemies in that region are guaranteed to kill you. And then there are the grasshopper-y enemies that sometimes just..... stop moving. For up to a minute at a stretch. Before they enter the visible part of the map where your gun can hit them.
On top of that, the game actually, really gets [i]worse[/i] the further you get into things. See, you [i]start[/i] with a given set of items and slowly unlock more. But between the rarity system, the aggressively limited inventory system, the aggressively limited upgrade system, and the largely uncontrollable part-RNG, what this means is that by your tenth unlock or so the ability to make any sort of 'build' has flung itself out a window into the heart of an erupting volcano. It's just a constant spam of 1-star parts you don't need in numbers too small to try to upgrade them into the parts you [i]do[/i] need, with extremely, painfully rare drops of 2- and 3-star parts that will actually bolster your damage totals.
And further, in a game in which boss health is too high for the speed they move at, bosses were recently bolstered with a too-powerful freeze immunity, forcing you to rely entirely on knockback (a part that I see in [i]maybe[/i] half my runs) which doesn't work on bosses anyway at 2-star rarity or below, because they move further in any given second than the effect pushes them back.
A final gripe, which would feel petty if it weren't the least of a long stream of annoyances, is that nothing in the game actually shows your damage numbers. All effects are additive percentage shifts—so it's not hard to punch them into a calculator—but if you want to know the real numbers effects of parts on your gun, you are going to need a calculator or piece of scrap paper to run the numbers yourself. It would be extra bothersome if victory didn't feel entirely based on the RNG favoring you, rather than the damage numbers of your gun.
If you're looking at this and remembering those old Flash wave-defence games? This is [i]not[/i] that. It's clearly meant to [i]resemble[/i] that, but the actual gameplay loop is unrelated. As it stands, I just can't recommend this.
Oh, and lest anyone get after me for saying that the gun parts are entirely RNG-based: Yes, there are slots in your inventory you can unlock, the first pair at wave 25, that respectively increase and decrease the drop rates of certain items by 50%. How does this affect the game? Couldn't tell you. Is the effect noticeable at all? That's a negative, Ghost Rider. Does it increase drops irrespective of rarity (increasing 1-star and 3-star both)? No clue. Does it irrevocably cost the item you want to see more of? Why, yes, yes it does. Which makes it a [i]bad[/i] choice at the beginning of a run and a questionable one further in.
And, to be clear, this [i]looks[/i] cool. Gun-customization is one of those things that doesn't come up in interesting ways nearly often enough. I [i]want[/i]ed this to be a cool, fun game. As it stands, it isn't.
