Project: Firmament

A strategic top-down shooter of sorts. Core gameplay loop is hard to get down at first and the lack of player agency can be frustrating at times, but straightforward enough. You don't have complete control over your character, rather you have to queue up your attacks, which definitely is interesting. The game really starts to pick up when you level up and get various perks, but it does take a while to grind things out. As you have to play all 3 characters to progress, the grind does triple, although it is a lot faster. The unique mechanic of eating corpses, dubbed Entralla, is cool in theory. It serves as both a Borderland-esque "Second-Wind" and a means to cash-out for a unique item. Big issue when 8/10 of the items had nothing to do with my planned build. This, paired with a lack of agency over which item I could get, made the second half of this mechanic more of a chore than anything. Luckily it isn't needed, but it's still disappointing. Neat implementation of difficulty. Basically, you can modify certain aspects of things you fight, making them faster, invisible, various spawns, things like that. Definitely changes how you go about fighting them, although some of them are more trouble then they're worth. There's also the base difficulty increase, which definitely sours my opinion over the aspects. Story was great, and the characters were also nice. It definitely kept me in when I was malding over certain levels. Dialogue was a bit awkward at places, but luckily it wasn't too often. The custom art is neat and I love the little "voices." You can also collect various lore-bits... somehow? It's a bit unclear. From a completionist standpoint, most of the things can be done just by playing the game. Missing a bit of lore and 2 achievements as of writing this [06/30/26], but that's for future me to deal with. Minor spoiler, [spoiler]I have no idea why Crocodile man has the hardest missions. Entralla's sweetest crocodile forced to face Interitus hardest trials, truly a tragedy[/spoiler]. [spoiler]For the "Secret" achievement[/spoiler], [spoiler]there's a hidden cracked wall near the bottom[/spoiler][spoiler]of "Crash Site" you gotta blow up[/spoiler]

Good game, with an interesting twist on the usual top-down shooter gameplay where it's less about twitch shooting and more about properly queuing up your shots to take down the right enemies. While it might seem basic at first, it ramps up as the game layers on more and more mechanics as you unlock perks and go up in difficulty. Much like the dev's previous game this one has a lot of meat to it so if it clicks with you it'll be well worth the price.