EdMund McMillen returns to his roots set with the Binding of Isaac in another rogue-lite--featuring peepee poopoo jokes, early 2000's era style animation, and bashing innocent small animals over the head with a crucifix. Mewgenics doesn't evolve much of the standard stylings of what has come before. But the titles from E.M. have never been much for flash and flair beyond the art style resembling the name. Its all about the gameplay. And Mewgenics delivers on that feature.
The gameplay itself consists of two major loops--cat adventuring and breeding. Adventures see your team of strays go off into stages, consisting of various battlefields and random, skill based pass/fail events and bosses. Each battle leads to a level up for one of your kitties, giving either a active ability to use, or a passive to build your cat around. Fights in the isometric battlefields are pretty satisfying to complete. One of the most significant metrics for judging a rogue-lite is in the amount of variety each run contains, and the game passes on this with flying colors. Each of the 14 classes comes with 50 actives and 25 passives, which leads to functionally infinite combinations of each, not counting the neutral abilities that get sprinkled in from time to time, nor the upgrades you can get to each of them. Beyond that, there's equipment, weapons to use, and environmental hazards to avoid or abuse your enemies with. Safe to say you'll be getting a unique spread of stuff each and every run. And even a weak ability on its face can become fantastic if you get the right build, or the right teammate to synergize with.
The "eugenics" side of the title comes as an evolving aspect of the game's downtime between adventures. Once your cats return after fighting various birds and demons with coin in paw, you spend said coins on furniture and other stuff to upgrade the living space for your cats. Passing days results in small events occurring, which may involve new kittens being born, granting not only a stream of new adventuring parties, but the potential for better cats, as they inherit their parents features. This gets pretty involved, between the tile puzzle of furniture in your house, the pairing of male/female/??? cats to get the best [strike]genetic abjurations[/strike] features to pass on, and making sure you don't make your cats family trees into family circles. As well as tossing your neighbors rejects for eventual upgrades. Don't expect this to kick in much for the first fifty-some-odd hours of gameplay however. This is clearly a deep gameplay feature and will take a while to come to fruition.
That is the best way to describe the whole package. It takes a while to bloom. Mewgenics doesn't present the immediate, "pick up and play" style that Isaac had, where the game is pretty much the same in concept throughout the whole experience. There's a lot of gameplay interactions hidden under the surface that aren't explained to you. Such as electric attacks hitting all enemies in water, not being able to split move, or that bleed thorns transfers to your clerics trying to help a kitty out. These range however, and some really don't make sense, such as water attacks extinguishing lit candles, but ice don't(???). There are some inconsistencies, such as Necromancer having many skills relying on being downed to function properly. Other classes don't have to carry such a burden of dead skills that might be good if you happen to get the right stuff. Crap like that sucks to learn when you really need it.
Even with those annoying bits, what matters really is how good each run is to play, and fundamentally, Mewgenics is easy to recommend to fans of the rogue-lite genre looking for more broken builds to abuse bosses with.
