SWAPMEAT

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SWAPMEAT is a good time with friends. It's sorta like Risk of Rain 2 meets Helldivers with a wacky and chaotic aesthetic that I wanna compare to Earthworm Jim. The bright colors and chipper music keeps the experience feeling light and fun. Stakes never feel too high, you're just cruisin around meaty planets with your buds and blowing stuff up. That said there's a ton to do. Lots of upgrades to grind out, giving you lots of reasons to keep coming back to earn more and get more powerful. Assuming I can get my friends in, I'd put this game on my regular rotation for casual Friday night fun. Definitely recommended, especially if you want some silly action with buddies.

Way too overstimulating with way too much stuff going on on screen with very little explanation or direction. I've seen a lot of comparisons to Risk of Rain but the gameplay loop is worse, the progression is drip-fed to the player and the soundtrack is very mediocre. Also I will say the like... hip young "meme" language throughout the game is giving me Borderlands 3 dialogue in terms of how cringey some of it is.

♥♥♥♥ is like beatin your meat with a fever

Good fun, excellent art direction, and strikes a tone that Borderlands wishes it could. The movement is probably the best thing about the game mechanically. Finding a meat combo that serves your playstyle is oh-so-nice.

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Really fun roguelite with great progression and enjoyable co-op. It’s easy to jump in and play a round or two, but there’s enough depth to keep you coming back for more. Also works great on macOS with an Xbox controller. Highly recommended!

This feels more fun to play than RoR 2, but this in no way is a 1.0 release. It's an Early Access game with Early Access game issues. The sound is awful, is too loud and cacophonous with the default settings (and it can still somehow stay loud at 10% volume, with some sounds becoming way too quiet, and some bursting your eardrums). And yet you are supposed to use sound to identify and deal with specific threats. The performance is unstable. There is nothing in this game that should be tanking a modern 3090-based rig to below 60, let alone below 30 FPS, and yet it does, at least a few times per level. The balance is weird. The maps are pretty huge while your basic movement speed is pretty slow. You are on a timer though, so if you aren't moving quickly, you aren't doing much in time. But there are so many cool 'meats' that don't add mobility, and it just feels sub-optimal to be using them. The progression is unnecessarily grindy. I get that it's supposed to keep me hooked and extend the replay-ability, but it just starts feeling like an annoying chore way too soon. Bosses are just boring damage sponges. They could have had two times less health and nothing of value would have been lost. I would personally like an 'auto-fire' option in the settings. With how many enemies the game is throwing at you (especially in co-op), there are very few moments when I don't want to be firing my gun, since the ammo is unlimited and the reload mini-game is actually pretty fun to do (and buffs your damage if you got the right upgrades). Holding the left mouse button down for long periods of time is uncomfortable and painful, so I don't see why this couldn't be an option. All in all, a bit too pricey for what is essentially a mislabeled early access playtest.