Enter the Gungeon

I spent an ungodly amount of time getting the last piece of the round to kill the past. I want to rip the hair off my scalp with the effort it took to get it done. 15/10 would be violently slaughtered by the kill pillars again

As much as I waned to like this game, in the end it failed to shine. I am very sorry to write this negative review as I have given the game several attempts in over 2 hours with every possible approach just so as to dig up an excuse to push it into "Recommend", as the potential was immense. Pros: The design is cute and well optimized to be fast, without unnecessary loading times. The idea of being a quick-paced bullet hell was well technically prepared and there were no bugs, slow responses, or glitches. Cons: The greatest irony is that the game based its main mechanic around strategy-shifting inventiveness based on an expected myriad of different-shooting weapons - which turned out to be a total miss (!pun intended). Not only is a vast majority of weapons useless in terms of damage dealt to bosses with no more difference than in cosmetic quirks, but also do new weapons come up so rarely that in most of runs I ended up having the starting weak weapon as the only one up to the level boss. As the main difference from "Binding of Isaac", for example, that has its own webpages dedicated to the complexity of not only how weapons and items interact with each other, but also that actually gives you palpable progress as you move on, "Enter the Gungeon" is so absolutely random that it keeps you in the shallows unless by some immense stroke of luck in one in 10 runs you happen to find a weapon worth having - and by that the single measuring point are the bosses - the game has unlockable characters and items that supposedly shift this, but gives no drive to invest the time to do so. ! - Possible Redeeming Caveat: Some characters that happen along the way can unlock new weapons and behaviors, but honestly the game provided very little incentive to invest in multiple runs while relying on pure luck. Except for bosses and a slight few regular enemies, the enemies didn't pose a challenge. But the bosses weren't even that difficult as much as they were simply too tedious to defeat. The weapons do a ridiculously small mount of damage and boss battles never feel like more than a chore of finding out their pattern and repeating it for a couple of minutes, no matter which weapon you have. Also, the boss battles vary in regards of what type of level you get for the boss room - some boss rooms will spawn with unbreakable cover-a-plenty, while same bosses may appear in fully open range, turning what was supposed to be a fast-paced bullet hell into a click & walk simulator. Another illogical point are the player characters - their "special skills" barely attribute to anything noticeable, and none of them (at least in my experience) proved to have some "hidden treasure" perk that made playing as anything but the Marine a better choice. All in all: A well-designed and technically sound game with an immense squandered potential.