ROUNDS

Macht einfach immer wieder Bock, obwohl es so simpel ist. Die verschiedenen auswählbaren Fähigkeiten machen das Spiel immer wieder neu spannend und abwechslungsreich. Ein Update mit mehr dieser Fähigkeiten oder sogar Spielmodi wäre natürlich trotzdem toll

An arcade fighting game in which each player evolves the abilities of their character on each loss. [hr][/hr] Rounds is a 2D shooter all about one-on-one duels. You and your opponent are thrown Ito a random stage and must kill each other, being rewarded half a point when you’re successful. Once a player earns a full point, they win the round, with the first to 5 rounds won taking the game. Your characters can of course walk, jump, duck and shoot, depleting a limited pool of three bullets that is refilled after a few seconds. Shots have noticeable travel time and are affected by gravity, forcing you to predict where your opponent will move and which path your bullets will take. To make things more interesting, you can also block on a cooldown, with properly timed blocks cancelling any damage and reflecting shots that hit you. Beyond being shot, players will also take damage from touching the edges of the screen and when being hit by physics objects, giving you some additional tactical options. The thing differentiating Rounds from any standard arcade shooter is the fact, that you can upgrade your character’s abilities, creating a build to counter your opponent. When a match starts, each player gets to pick a single upgrade, with another one being given to the losing player after each round, letting you stack up to 5 of them. When choosing an upgrade, you’re given 5 cards to pick from, each of which provides a different effect you get until the end of the match. These card effects are mostly made up of basic number tweaks, like increasing your health or bullet speed, as well as minor bonus effects, like letting your blocks do damage, having bullets push your apply push forces or making your block freeze your opponent when nearby. Beyond these, there are also some rare cards with entirely unique abilities, like gaining a revive, shooting endlessly in exchange for health or directly controlling the movement of shot bullets. Combined, all of these cards enable you to create quite unique builds, e.g. shooting a dozen bouncing bullets which apply poison or having your block attract your opponent while spawning a damage area and reloading your gun. Overall, this creates a neat arms race with players either continuously buffing certain abilities until they become completely ridiculous or cleverly trying to nullify the other’s strategy, oftentimes with hilarious results. Sadly, there are also some obvious balancing issues, most prominently in how the cards provided are way too random, often leading to synergies you’d like to go for not being available or leaving you unable to counter your opponent. This is worsened by the fact that cards you already choose can show up again, which can make for fun staking but can also be quite annoying, especially when combined with multiple of the offered cards providing similar effects (e.g. the same damage increase with different downsides). The way card rarities work, with some effects just being straight-up better than others, which becomes problematic when one player gets way luckier and gets a bunch of special effects while the other is stuck with number tweaks. I also often found the 5 rounds to be too short, limiting the number of combinations you can add on and often ending without you being able to properly explore your build – especially when you’re the leading player and don’t even get to pick all 5 cards. On a more positive note, I think that Rounds looks quite stylish, with sharp, contrast-rich graphics that are a bit simple but fit the game quite well. The levels in particular often look stunning, with different texture patterns that can be animated or shift their colour as well as dynamically animated transitions between them. Similarly, upgrade cards feature witty animated artwork unique to the specific card. This continues into the gameplay itself – with most cards applying some kind of effect to mark their presence, like changing the shape and size of your bullets, spawning unique particles when their effect is triggered or changing and/or adding sound effects to the related actions. On the topic of sound, Rounds’ sound design is superb, with fitting, juicy sound effects accompanying each action, which are properly juiced up when creating a stacked build, e.g. bullet hits turning into the equivalent of bombs going off after stacking a bunch of damage upgrades. The background music is similarly fantastic, consisting of fast-paced electronic tracks which fit the gameplay and frankly extremely catchy. Outside of the core gameplay, Rounds sadly doesn’t offer many more things to do, sadly lacking alternative game modes and the ability to customize gameplay settings. You’re able to design your characters, creating up to 8 prefabs using different eyes, mouths and accessories. This is a fun system, though also somewhat limited in how much you can do with it. It’s also a bit of a shame that there aren’t additional items available for you to unlock, as the game lacks an incentive to continue playing once you’ve explored most of its upgrade options. [hr][/hr] With all that being said, I had massive amounts of fun with Rounds, with the game keeping me hooked way too long considering its small scope. While the amount of content is somewhat lacking and gameplay balance can vary a lot, it’s great to have a few quick matches of rounds with a friend and I whole-heartedly recommend the game.