This was a pleasant surprise!
As a fan of traditional coin pushers, this has an interesting spin on the formula. Whereas in normal coin pushers, the goal is to of course strategically place coins so that the coin piles shuffle into the trough to get as much as possible, you still do this, but it's got a rogue like spin to it.
and the roguelike element of this game is EVERYTHING, and is incredibly addictive. So let's talk about that.
In traditional coin pushers, you are limited only by how many coins you have. Goal of course being once your coins run out, the game ends, and you walk away with however many you collected in the play session. However, in this game, you don't run out of coins, they are not the limiting factor. Instead, the coins are a revolving loadout (of sorts) where you can fire them infinitely. The limiting factor is your character. Works exactly as you expect: If your characters health points reach zero, game over.
But in coin pushers, they don't really have an "offensive" element to them, and in P&P this is remedied by the enemy baubles. They are the ones who will drop your HP, and can only do that in one of two ways: Reaching the drop zone successfully and dropping in (the standard way) or firing at you directly, which is specialized to certain later mobs and the bosses themselves.
So the game flow is to keep the coins flowing in (which goes straight to your bank to be spent on resources after the game, more on that in a little bit), while keeping the enemies at bay. You use your coins that you launch to keep the enemy baubles back, to keep it going.
What I was surprised the most about is how much control you have in how you "attack" enemies. This is handled primarily with the charging mechanic. Less charge (or just basic click) you sort of flick the coin up and it has a heavy arc, which you can effectively dribble the coin on enemies if you arc it right. Otherwise, the more charge you use, the more linear the shot is (less to no arc, but it shoots like a bullet). But on TOP of that, you can gather powerups on the board itself (denoted as floating targets) that can do all sorts of fun alterations to your coins. Everything ranging from double shot, larger coins, elementals, etc.
Speaking of fun alterations, the elements of a good roguelike that has a system of meta-progress is present here. By that I mean, whatever you earn in a run, can be re-invested for permanent stat upgrades, and these are your standards: Health, armor, shot speed, size, damage, etc. If you make a mistake, or want to re-evaluate where you paid your currency into, then that's fine, each stat has a refund button to use at your leisure. You aren't hard locked in to a path, but it's there to encourage you to always build up before your next run to make it easier for yourself.
and let's say you don't want to invest in that specifically (although, again, you really should), there is a sort of lootbag system where you pay 1k gold to open a random bag that consists of elemental coins you can use to bolster your next run. The typical elements are present, behaving as expected: Fire/Acid(poison) = DoT, Ice/Sleep = movement pause/debuff, Vampirism = life steal, lightning =chain damage.
These you can accumulate before each run, and outfit your character with so that in your coin revolution, you get the special coins to use as you see fit. But if you do it this way, just know that whatever you use does get expended at the end of the run. So they last the whole run, until it ends, and you either have to get them through another loot box or associated challenge.
Challenges are your achievements, pretty straight forward. Works almost exactly like Risk of Rain does where you get perma unlocks or some form of reward for getting them. Can be everything from relics or other equippables that you can outfit your character with, highly coveted gems that are the secondary currency you use to unlock perma meta upgrades, a coin amount, etc. Basically, each run is rewarding, because you always come away with something. There is very rarely a "bad" run because even a bad run can be profitable whether that be accumulating your coin count, working towards progress for the more loftier challenges, or grabbing the random gem here or there.
I did want to address something super quick regarding difficulty. I think if you play this game with a sort of traditional coin pusher mentality, it's going to probably trip you up. I want to encourage you that while the game defaults to three skull difficulty, you really should start at one skull difficulty to get your bearings. There is no draw back in doing this, and the later difficulties are really for when you build your character up so the game scales with you as you get stronger and stronger.
So again, start with 1 or 2 skull difficulty, not 3, so you can build up your resources after a few attempts (if you are finding the gameplay loop a bit too difficult starting out).
There are some elements I can't really comment on, partly because I haven't experienced them yet. For example, you get more than just the knight character! I believe there are two others, so that's an additional element to work towards and have fun experimenting with. But even with just the knight, he had an incredible amount of versatility with his special ability being a spiky mass ball that bulldozes everything it rolls over, and the passive shield ability that keeps enemy baubles from entering the drop zone. So I am excited to see what the other characters provided.
I need to start wrapping this review up soon, but I hope I painted a good enough picture of what this game is. Long story short: It's a coin pusher rogue like with a very addictive rewarding gameplay loop that really nails that progression of getting stronger and stronger from each run. If any of that sounds interesting to you, give it a shot, you won't be disappointed!
