RANDOBOUNCE

I want to be able to recommend this as a fun arcade roguelike experience, but there are 3 main fundamental issues that make me unable to recommend it in its current state. 1. The inability to control your movement is a fun concept, but it lacks in a lot of areas involving the enemies. The only control you get over your character's movement is your initial launch, which is ultimately meaningless if where you go after cannot be controlled. Though the game warns you where an enemy is about to spawn, this is ultimately meaningless when you have no way to react if one chooses to spawn on top of or right in front of you. This makes the skill expression of the game basically nonexistent. Though you can argue that you are able to shoot the enemy before it hurts you, most of the weapons in this game are so slow that later in a run, you are guaranteed to take cheap shots from pretty much everything. 2. The upgrade system is far too RNG dependant and the upgrades themselves range from necessary to survive to outright useless. Firstly, the necessary ones: Damage, Fire Rate, and Guns. Without at least one of these upgrades in decent surplus, you cannot win a run. It will not happen. Enemies scale their health quite quickly in this game (and flatly), and since there is no knockback or any way to manipulate your character's movement as stated previously, you need stats. And with stats being everything, having upgrades that basically do nothing or just feel like they're taking up space in the pool, it makes it even harder to complete a run. There are many upgrades in this game that rely on your bouncing off an enemy. Those upgrades feel really bad to use, because they require you to take damage. There are exactly 2 abilities in this game that can heal you, and if neither of those show up, the "bounce off enemies" upgrades are limited time use. This means that the "bounce off enemies" upgrades are either useless because you have stronger options, or useless because you cannot heal and guarantee continuous use. They feel like they take up space in the pool that could be instead granted to stat boosts or better passive effects like the black hole. 3. The weapons kinda... suck. They're fun to use in the first 2 minutes of a run, but most of them are way too slow to be able to be used effectively. The enemies all function exactly the same just with each new enemy having more health than the last, so there's nothing really interesting that needs to be built involving the weapons besides raw stat boosts. And since you are guaranteed to take many cheap potshots from enemies early on in a slow weapon run, decent stat ups or the heal upgrades are even more necessary. Every weapon requires a damage increase, and most require a fire rate increase or an extra gun to be even usable. Since all that is purely RNG, there is a very good chance that a run dies because you had zero control over your situation, much like the rest of the game. This game basically gives you zero control over anything except your aim, barrel placement, and initial launch direction. It's a neat concept, and I LOVE having a little orb that's covered in guns as that can be quite fun, but this game needs heavy refining. The game takes away 80% of the player's control, making it feel like every death wasn't your fault due to either cheap enemy placements or lack of luck. I had a full 20 minute run go without a single damage upgrade appear even ONCE, and I only survived because I had good fire rate and started with the best weapon in the game, the "Soul Seeker". Without that weapon, I genuinely would never have been able to beat even a single run. Every run I have won was because I happened upon Soul Seeker and the Stairway from Heaven powerup at some point. I was rarely granted guns, and the ones I was given usually didn't matter in the end due to the raw power of Soul Seeker. It feels like it's overtuned, but it only really feels that way because every other weapon needs far more upgrades to be able to even match up to it. Soul Seeker just scales better. All in all, I want to like this game and give it a recommend, but these fundamental problems make the game feel pretty bad to play. Not to mention that the current price is a tad steep for the amount of content in this game. I have played it for about 2 hours and had seen everything the game had to offer in the first 30 minutes. I only kept playing to show it off to a friend of mine and to write this review.

I'm the fool on this one. I thought "uncontrollably" in the description was hyperbole. It is not. [strike]Shooting the various guns does impart some amount of movement on the character, but especially in the case of powerful, slow firing guns, not enough to make it feel like the player has any agency on what is happening.[/strike] I've been informed that the very small amount of agency I thought the player had was in fact placebo. My mistake. Gameplay loop for 90% of runs looks like : shoot, enemy spawns, now you're ricocheting off six other enemies and you're dead. The gameplay in the trailer is extremely misleading - you need to invest far more time than I'm willing to in order luck into a run that gets a 3rd barrel involved, and skips the all the runs that die long before that. Post a trailer that's the first minute of a run and let people decide if that's a game they want to play. Feels like the developer spent way too long playing their own creation without ever hearing feedback from someone that didn't have 200 hours in it.

Willing to give this more time when I get the chance, there's a lot to like here! Your movement direction is 100% random, which does lead to a bit of RNG that is completely out of your control. I think it'd be nice if shooting also had some effect on your movement direction so we still had some control for which direction we'll be going next. Some tweaking on the enemy spawns to avoid enemies spawning right on top or right in front of the player would be appreciated too, that's currently the most frustrating part for me atm. The vibes are awesome. Love the graphics and sound, and the menus all feel good. I wish there was a way to quicker restart between runs instead of getting booted back to the main menu, though. The weapons aren't all super viable, some could definitely use some reworking or buffs (Anything AoE-based is hard to warrant due to the speed the player moves). Anything homing is automatically one of the best choices. The ability to mount more than one barrel is really cool but something I almost feel would be better as a side upgrade separate from barrel upgrades or the timed "abilities". Maybe as a different unlock method, similar only in concept to how Vampire Survivors has both XP level up options and chests. This would help keep pools separate and maybe create some better RNG for the player :) I'd love to see more border variants. Different shapes to make the bouncing around feel fresh from run to run. I don't think one can really get used to the chaos of the single layout, so it'd be cool to see more variety. Some sort of indication of the "difficulty" you're at would be nice, new enemies sort of just appear and it can be hard to prepare for one enemy or the other. The warning indicator of new enemies spawning being colored similar to the arriving enemy could help to make choosing where to aim first nicer. Unsure why the other reviews are so negative about this project, this is a neat lil game! It's also cheap is hell so there's not much to complain about, just needs some further game design tuning here and there. The concept is unique and I think there's plenty of room to grow. Dev, please keep working on this, you've got a great base here.