The game wastes no time with lengthy explanations and immediately throws you into the role of a knight who wakes up in the middle of a desert with a pistol in his hands. What you are expected to do becomes clear almost instantly, since there is only one straight path ahead. After taking just a few steps, robots begin dropping in from all directions. They take several shots to bring down, and although firing wildly may seem tempting in the first minutes, this is not recommended because ammunition management plays a crucial role.
You do have a sword at your disposal, yet this is not nearly as useful as it first appears. Most enemies prefer to shoot at you from a distance rather than engage in close combat. There are a few foes that force you to switch to melee, but the overall focus remains firmly on ranged encounters. Defeated enemies drop ammunition regularly, though the situation becomes a little more complicated once you start handling a wider variety of weapons.
You eventually gain access to shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles, and other firearms, each requiring its own specific ammo type. To make matters more challenging, ammo drops can be difficult to spot because they are not highlighted and, unlike enemies, money, or objectives, they are not marked on the mini map.
After completing the tutorial, you are taken to the main hub which acts as a central base of operations and offers several options. The first is the stage terminal, where you unlock new stages in order as you clear the current one. Stages ask you to defeat enemies in an area, reach a specific location, or stay within a marked square until a meter fills up. These objectives can appear in combination during the same mission. Despite the environments being somewhat repetitive, there is usually at least one new twist or encounter that doesn’t make the experience repetitive.
Once a stage is completed, all the money you collected is brought back to the hub. Here you can spend it on ammunition resupplies or invest in new weapons and attachments, and this progression system helps the game stand out. Beating a stage often rewards you with a new weapon or attachment, but relying solely on rewards is not the best approach. It is usually more efficient to buy exactly what you want.
The shop offers most items right from the beginning, and the only true limitation is the amount of money you have. Even this can be addressed easily, since stages can be replayed as often as you like. An even more rewarding method of earning money appears once you realize that gear rewards are granted every time you beat a stage.
This means you can repeatedly farm the same mission, collect duplicate items, and sell them for extra cash. If you feel confident in your skills, you can also attempt stages on hard mode, which unlocks after you complete a stage for the first time. Hard mode greatly increases the number of enemies, but also boosts the amount of money you receive and even offers unique weapons and attachments that cannot be found elsewhere.
Weapons are mostly self explanatory and include more than ten different types. Naturally, the shop does not sell everything, and the more exotic tools of destruction must be earned through gameplay. Attachments are fun to experiment with. The selection can feel overwhelming at first because the list is quite large, but fortunately there is a filter that allows you to show attachments available only for the weapon you want.
There is something for every playstyle, including various scopes, triggers, grips, silencers, and many other options. Most attachments offer a stat boost, though a few come with small drawbacks. Even with these limitations, you can transform a simple weapon into an impressive one by carefully selecting attachments. Ammunition for pistols is also free, which is a nice touch and ensures that you always have something to fall back on.
The last shop in the hub offers special perks and customization options. Cosmetic items do not offer any gameplay benefits and therefore feel unnecessary, but the items section is much more interesting. One category includes consumables such as grenades and quick healing supplies. Healing works on its own as long as you avoid damage for a short time, yet having an extra healing option can be helpful.
The other category is tied to your shield and sword. The basic shield can block bullets at the cost of ability charge, which eventually refills. You can purchase improved versions that activate automatically without requiring you to hold a button, or you can replace the shield entirely with abilities such as short dashes or regeneration. Swords, on the other hand, must be found first.
The stage where a particular sword is located appears next to its locked icon, so you always know where to look. However, locating them is not always simple because items are not highlighted, and you need to walk directly over the correct area and wait for a prompt to appear. This applies not only to swords but also to the many melee weapons available, including axes and katanas with different attack speeds and damage properties.
Although the game does not introduce anything groundbreaking, it offers a satisfying amount of shooting excitement. However, it also comes with some issues. One annoying problem is the extremely small interface and font size. Instead of expanding across the screen, the shop menus and attachment management windows appear only in a small section in the center, which makes reading them uncomfortable.
There are also larger problems, such as suddenly falling through the floor. This occurs particularly in the cave stage, but the game mitigates the frustration by including checkpoints throughout each mission. This allows you to restart and respawn at the last checkpoint instead of losing all progress. It also means you do not have to complete an entire stage in a single attempt. Balance issues do appear as well, most notably during boss fights where you can run out of ammunition completely if you do not know the correct strategy.
