This game is honestly kind of fun, and I can definitely see myself or other people sinking a bunch of hours into it. The aesthetic is cool, and the music is nice as well. However, the game is riddled with far too many abysmal design decisions that make it genuinely annoying and miserable to play for long stretches.
[h2]Hostile to casuals and the 500-hour slog[/h2]
The game is extremely hostile to casuals. You cannot just play on normal difficulty and experience everything it has to offer. You are practically forced to suffer through Hard Mode if you actually want the good unlockables. Some of the most powerful items in the entire game, like Godhead or Death Certificate, demand that you beat every single endgame boss on Hard Mode, often with joke characters like The Lost who die in one hit. It completely alienates anyone who just wants to play casually without pulling their hair out.
On top of this, achieving 100% completion (the "Dead God" achievement) is a test of self hatred that can easily take upwards of 500 hours. Not only do you have to complete the game with 34 different characters, but you also have to physically find and pick up every single item out of the 700+ in the game at least once.
[h2]Mobile game timegates in a single player roguelike[/h2]
Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the completion requirements are the daily challenges. The game actually time gates your progress behind real world calendar days. You are forced to participate in 31 daily challenges for the "Dedication" achievement, meaning you physically cannot complete the game in under a month regardless of skill.
Even worse is "The Marathon" achievement, which requires you to win 5 daily runs in a row. Since you can only do one per day, if you lose on day five because the game gave you a terrible randomly generated run, your streak resets, and you start the five day wait all over again. Tying core unlocks to mandatory daily check ins is mobile game tier garbage design that has no place in a single-player roguelike.
[h2]Trash level design, visual clutter and the 4 way shooting crutch[/h2]
The level design is complete trash in a lot of places. Sometimes you find completely isolated islands with loot that are impossible to reach unless you happen to have some random, obscure items. While some rooms are fine, others are straight up just random, annoying enemy spam, like rooms that have a bunch of skull enemies hidden behind boulders. There are also room layouts that practically guarantee you take unavoidable damage the second you walk through the door. Enemies will spawn right next to the entrance and bend you over before you even have a fraction of a second to react.
The game also loves cheap "gotcha" room transitions, placing spikes or hazardous obstacles directly next to doorways. If you walk in with slightly too much momentum, you take damage before the screen has even finished panning. Compounding this is the 4 way shooting system. It feels less like a genuine mechanic and more like a crutch to make the game feel difficult, because the vast majority of the difficulty revolves entirely around trying to navigate it.
As your run goes on the game turns into an unreadable mess of visual vomiting. Late builds fill the screen with giant particles going everywhere, completely obscuring enemy projectiles. This visual chaos gets even worse if you pick up items that spawn "friendly" enemies to fight for you. Mid fight it becomes literally impossible to tell who is an enemy and who isn't. You end up frantically dodging your own allies' shots and wasting time shooting them because the screen is such an unreadable mess. Add in terrible color contrast like red enemies shooting red projectiles against a red background (the womb for example) and it becomes an eye bleeding nightmare where you take damage simply because you cannot see what is happening. The bullet visibility setting does not help.
[h2]Punished for unlocking with bloated pools and pure RNG[/h2]
Because the game relies heavily on RNG, skill is only about 30% of the battle. Your entire run often lives or dies based on the second floor boss fight. If you take one random hit of red heart damage and miss your first Devil Deal, your run can instantly snowball into a miserable, underpowered slog. If the RNG decides not to give you damage upgrades, you are just signing up for 40 minutes of chipping away at sponge enemies with base damage.
The game also punishes you for unlocking things. As you play more, the item pool gets severely bloated with useless garbage. You constantly find terrible active items instead of actual stat upgrades. The mathematical odds of finding genuinely good items keep shrinking as the pool fills up with trash. The items are also heavily inconsistent: some directly tell you what they do, while others straight up say some irrelevant junk. The game desperately needs an in game encyclopedia. Instead, you are stuck guessing or having to google just to figure out what you picked up.
To make matters worse, the game brags about having near infinite item combinations, but synergies are often incredibly disappointing. While there are a few genuinely great combos, many items straight up override each other. You can spend an entire run building a cool tear build, only to pick up Mom's Knife or Epic Fetus which completely replaces your tears, nullifying half the items you collected. Instead of cleverly blending items together, the game often lets the "strongest" item take over, ruining the fun of experimenting.
[h2]Blind Curses and useless pills[/h2]
The floor curses are a massive pain that just ruin the fun. Curse of the Blind completely destroys the whole point of making strategic choices because you are forced to pick up items blindly, easily ruining an hour long run just because the game hid a terrible synergy from you. It does not test skill, it just randomly punishes you. Similarly, the pill mechanic is straight up garbage. Why gamble on a random pill when half of them give you permanent stat downgrades like tears down or speed down? Most of the time they sit on the floor being completely useless because the risk of ruining your run is way higher than getting a tiny stat boost.
[h2]Braindead bosses and the DLC paywall[/h2]
The bosses are extremely boring and suffer from terrible balancing. They are either braindead easy like Gemini, or just plain annoying. Fighting them usually amounts to dealing tedious chip damage until you get randomly screwed over by a tiny fart particle in your way.
This awful design peaks with Delirium, the game's most notorious endgame boss. Delirium constantly shapeshifts, moves at erratic speeds, and frequently "telefrags" the player, meaning it will literally teleport directly on top of your character causing instant and completely unavoidable damage. It is the ultimate middle finger at the end of a long run.
To make matters worse the way the game handles its paid DLCs is literally scumbag behavior. These expansions do not act like traditional, optional DLCs. They are treated as sequential updates that the developer forces you to buy in a specific order. You literally cannot purchase or play the final expansion, Repentance, unless you have already bought both Afterbirth and Afterbirth+. Because of this mandatory dependency chain, you are forced to swallow an incredibly expensive price tag just to play the latest version. Disregarding occasional sales, buying the base game and every DLC to get the complete experience nets you over $50. Locking balance updates, quality of life changes, and the full version of the game behind a rigid, multi tiered paywall is a blatantly anti consumer way to squeeze money out of the player base. No wonder the developer made an entire game mode called Greed. It was clearly inspired by personal experience.
If you can stomach all of that, this game can genuinely be fun. But for most people it is going to be a miserable experience.
