This game is brutal. It is a tough as nails twin stick shooter well your build choices make a huge difference in your success. Each element is super interactive and has dramatic implications on your success. Like many space twin stick shooters it has a modular design to the creation of your ideal pathogen, you have internal and external slots what this game does which is a bit more special is that many of these components that you choose empower the connected elements around them. By combining certain infusers you can create insanely powerful combinations and apply them to weapons and skills which can potentially cause them to wildly grow in power. This is very satisfying when you pull it off successfully. There are also certain combinations which synergize incredibly well with certain pathogens. For instance, the nanobot has 1 health and gets a ton of armor as you play. There is a mutation which gives you 40% attack speed when below 2 health. This means you can keep it up with 100% uptime and you can take the ability multiple times. With some slower attacks, they become incredibly strong and fast with this combo. There are also certain modifiers you can get like cancerous which makes the organelle replicate and overwrite other similar organelles. If you have a favorite weapon that is cancerous, you can take random weapons and they will gradually mutate into the cancerous one. There are also mitochrondria, which have various conditions and then generate power for abilities or overpower infusers and abilities. By combining various elements you can make some insane builds. You can also freely bind your weapons and abilities to different buttons to have more flexibility. As you go through the game, you also get mutations which grant various bonuses and at certain intervals allow you to gain additional slots or change your slots into internal, external, overcharged, omni slots, or bonus damage slots.
You also have a persistent progression mechanic where you can level up your pathogen with plasmids. Leveling them the first time with a pathogen cost extra and then raises the cap for all pathogens. With the higher cap, if you have another pathogen you want to level, its much cheaper to level up so once you reach various caps you can really try a lot of different things.
My favorite is probably the co op setup. It plays a bit like twin cop or something, you each control half of a pathogen. You can build them out independently and each player controls them on their own. It is actually pretty overpowered in the slots its given but by splitting the workload, it can become very cumbersome as you have to synch up and work together when it comes to dodging in a bullet hell. Its very satisfying.
The game also has a difficulty modifier thing once you beat it and it allows you to customize your gameplay bigtime for big rewards, this heavily reduces the grind.
Overall, its a great roguelite, especially for its price.
One of my favorite things in most games is when they have a local co op mode
