It's a good game. Nice, simple color scheme and design with pretty fluid animation. Like an upscale version of an old handheld. Gameplay-wise it's a two button beat'em up. Every character has essentially three moves: ground (basic) attack, jump attack, and dodge. I couldn't find a lot of information on unlocks or such, so without playing the demo, here's a quick rundown because the game is a bit scarce on information too.
There's a day and night cycle. When you collect enough money off the ground, you level up and can choose from three random unlocked items. Each item's icon (not the card) is colored in either orange-scale or blue-scale. Orange items are only active during the day. Blue are only active at night. The cycle is every 30 seconds, though there is a stylized analog dial in the top-middle. Each stage takes 20 minutes before the boss shows up. Killing enemies gives you back one health per enemy. As the stage progresses, the difficulty rises, enemies get more health, deal more damage, and spawn much quicker and more numerously.
To unlock things you need popcaps. You get popcaps primarily through fever combos. Every 50 enemies killed (plus 50 for every fever you've triggered) your combo meter is replaced with fever. Now every enemy killed contributes to caps once the fever ends. Popcaps can be spent on rerolls and double downs (allowing you to grab an item twice in one level up), but I think it's better to save them early on to grab a few equipables and the extra characters as you unlock them. I'm not completely sure, but I think current popcaps contributes to your end score if you die or complete a level. Your popcaps are always 0 at the beginning of the stage, so no cheesing with building up a bunch, so it's entirely dependent on the popcaps you acquire in the stage. Popcaps also contribute to metaprogress unlocks like most of the weapons and characters and other equippables.
You can't go wrong for $2.99 here. There's a decent amount of content and I spent nearly 6.5 hours getting most of it, with about 6 hours to my clear of stage three. The characters start becoming much more differentiated starting with the fourth, with the fifth and seventh characters being my personal preference (though the sixth and seventh both have the distinction of replacing the dodge with a unique move). But there are some negatives to the experience. The end lag on attacks and even hitstun is quite high. You cannot cancel them either. Couple this with the spawn rate of enemies and especially flying enemies or projectile throwers and the game can feel frustrating at times as you choose between clearing more enemies or just trying to avoid damage (in my experience, it's often better to try to clear than avoid). It also means that your safest move for most characters, the jump attack, is probably going to get spammed quite a bit toward the end of a stage.
The minigames are neat, but don't seem to serve much purpose beyond being something different. And they are so I like that, but the second one doesn't seem to work with controller and is pretty awkward even on keyboard.
I mentioned that information in and on the game is quite sparse from what I can tell. Unlocks are decent once you figure out what you're doing but otherwise feel pretty slow, especially starting out. That said, while I've completed the game, there's still one more unlock showing on the stats screen. Since I seem to have maxed the between stage bar, I'm not sure how to unlock it, but I'll probably play around more with it. I still have one last equip to actually unlock for use. You'll also notice a large orange and blue box next to your 12 item boxes. That's the fusion box and that blank box is your only hint that they exist. Fusions require two items to both be at max level, at which point you get a neat-o animation and a powerful extra weapon that's active no matter what time of day it is. Cool! Unfortunately for my OCD, I've only found two fusions in 6.5 hours, there's no indication of how many total there are nor do there seem to be any hints as to what the fusions are (and less importantly no indication of the ones you've already formed). I don't expect these things to be added, don't get me wrong, I know development is a tough thing, but there's no public information that I could find either so it's just blind luck that you level up the right items enough unless you're working towards one you already know. Honestly, even if you're working towards one combo, you only get one reroll per level up and once you fully upgrade a weapon, its card doesn't seem to go away, it just becomes a popcap card that gives you 30 or so popcaps so it can be hard to even fully upgrade your weapons sometimes.
Again, the game is $2.99 and there's plenty here for that price. Stick it out, unlock a character you like, and you get a game that's simple but entertaining once you get used to its rhythm.
