RICE - Repetitive Indie Combat Experience™

the game lags way too hard for me to even enjoy my bullet heaven.

Can't give a positive review on good faith. I've been very anti AI since the beggining of this craze, I couldnt believe my eyes when I beat a run and saw the developer thanking ChatGPT in the credits... I don't know what parts of the game were made using it, but I'm against it and always will be. The worst thing is that it's actually a really fun game!!! I will probably keep playing it for a while more, but like I said, I can't support a game that was made using genAI, sorry.

16 hours in one run, thats because the game, while fun, scales way too hard, too early. Needing to spend over 30 minutes in a level because of boss HP regen and scaling, reaching level 550+ by the end of it, only to crash out. The game isn't optimised that well, some weapons and abilities will immediately kill your game FPS, I almost wish the XP/currency global pickup ability would skip spawning the items on screen, as a major part of lag was the game trying to animate hundreds of objects. If you are able, you will be discarding abilities that help you, for the off-chance the game doesn't suddenly crash out, costing you everything you spent an hour or two trying to get. Beyond that, I almost wish the enemies could have animations turned off or any number of FPS-saver settings. Maybe if they didn't all spawn at once or any number of other things, it would save on the single frame lag, trying to spawn upwards of 200+ enemies where the game suddenly realises it has to solve quantum physics or something stupid. The ability after the same name 'FPS saver' Halving attack speed for double-hit is a direct nerf to your character, as once you one hit everything, now you are just left with half your attack speed for no reason. Everything that triggers, will work less often. I don't get any of my 1.1 million meta currency because this game, even in the event of it's own issues, does 'double or nothing', so putting 16 hours into the game, most of which was lag; isn't even rewarded. I couldn't decide to call a zone early or anything either because of that.

stopped updating

Mmmeh? It's not bad, there's just better variants. I wish there was a neutral. Still, I'm going to thumbs down entirely due to the optimization becoming horrendous very quickly into an endless run, which is due to having entirely too many entities on screen at once and being limited to a single CPU core (the latter is not the developer's fault as it's an engine limitation, but it still impacts a game designed like this). Coins everywhere and too many projectiles and death effects and everything else going off make the game a slideshow. There's more to be worked on for the title than just that though, and hopefully the developer will address them. One is that you can unlock virtually infinite metacurrency within only a handful of runs... and you'll both be damn near invincible doing it AND grind to a crawl trying to kill planets/abyss (but not enemies, which evaporate). Planets are what you get new weapons from, which you need to match three to upgrade (and then match three upgraded ones to upgrade further, so on), so the scaling hitting there means you'll rarely see the highest tier of weapons. Abyss is just what surrounds planets and hurts you if you stand on it, albeit extremely negligibly after the start. With a single upgrade to get max health per kill, you get thousands of hp regeneration and practically infinite hp, making all other forms of hp upgrades fairly pointless. Alternatively you can just watch your health ping pong back and forth between nothing and max if you have a good healing build and not much hp, but I'm not sure why you'd bother with it since getting +8 max HP per kill can lead to being in the hundreds of thousands of health + %max health barrier from a barrier upgrade you can get, vs only a couple thousand max hp maybe. You can make your health scale basically exponentially due to the number of enemies destroyed, but nothing else scales so easily even if there are technically exponential damage upgrades (it is a rare one, not often seen, so it doesn't usually get up to as high of values as your more generic sources of damage despite possibly being able to scale higher). You can eventually start to kill planets faster again, but by then you'll be running up against every wave dying instantaneously and lagging out your fps thanks to the coin and on-death effect spam, so you will not really be able to enjoy it. Either way, I endured it very and ended up getting so much metacurrency that buying all metaprogression I could want did not even put a dent in it.... from that one run. I now need no more unlocks, already, and the first few ascensions don't seem to add any new mechanics, so I'm not expecting future ones to either. What you see is what you get. There are no hidden mechanics you cannot unlock in the first thirty minutes or so--I'd found them all faster than I filled out my metaprogression. Another problem is the font scaling. The dev kindly put in HUD scaling options, but they only work in a match, not on the main menu or when in the metaprogression screen. This means if you have a high dpi screen, you may be straining to read tiiiiiny font on those screens. I'm sure the dev can fix this bit! The dev also did helpfully include an option to turn off the time-freezing anime slash some samurai enemies do to you, but it is listed as meme text with no indication that it can be turned off or on unless you click on it, which will be lost on some people. Altogether, I would say that the title lives up to its name. It is repetitive very quickly and holds little to do unless you like minmaxing, but I don't see why you would when the content can be so easily beaten to endless without any challenge as is. As is, the content is just slow, not challenging. I do have hopes for it improving though. Will update this later if it improves significantly.

3.5/10 - you level up to fast and i spent alot of time on the upgrade screen - upgrades are so minor they hardly effect gameplay most of the time - pre level upgrade costs become insane!!!! + 5$

You: "Can we get Vampire Survivors?" Mom: "We have Vampire Survivors at home." The Vampire Survivors you have at home:

don't believe what the other reviews say, the game is extremely good if it runs in your system

Not my cup of tea

If you have a big screen, you cannot play it. Don't buy it. The text is ridiculously little and there is no way to change it. I have waited for this game to continue getting updated but it doesn't. Also a lot of lag.