Friends vs Friends

I'm quite fond of Friends vs Friends. It's a fairly well made fusion of arena shooter and deckbuilder that ends up being a pretty frantic and unique experience. I really like the constant chaos of the game, it thoroughly tests your ability to strategize on the fly and adapt to whatever unique gamestate you've been thrust in. On top of that is solid presentation and furry characters I like. My problems with the main game lie in some hokey design and balancing. There's more than a few cards and card combos that are really oppressive and not at all fun to engage with. Weapon cards are already pretty strong, and then there's some maps where you just can't escape a shotgun or approach a sniper. There simply will be a lot of "What was I supposed to do there?"s. Where things get really rough is the meta-progression. I hate having to open booster packs for cards, and the fact that duplicates will upgrade a card and give it a plain stat boost is dumb. The cosmetics are cool, but getting them is a giant pain. You get the currency for them so slowly, and all that gets you is a chance at the gacha machine for Something. 4/5 cosmetic categories are lumped into one pool, so getting any one thing that you actually want necessitates a frustrating grind. The game works so well with friends, beyond the way most games do, because a lot of these problems just stop mattering when you can drum up house rules or mutual agreements on what is and isn't okay to use, and have them as motivation to play the game outside of the annoying meta-progression. It's hard to recommend if you can only do public matches with randos in this 3+ year old indie game with a declining playerbase, but it's an awesome experience if you have dedicated buddies to play with.