Did I play the same game as everyone else? I got this game for $2.59 (so 80% discount), and I still don't feel I got my money's worth. I love roguelikes, a lot. This...this wasn't good. I didn't think I would end up thinking about refunding a piddly $2.50, but I don't see myself ever playing that again. I'm going to list all of my gripes with the game, because I don't want other people to look at these other reviews and get suckered in, especially at full price.
1.) The game started in Russian automatically. Do yourself a favor if you're not familiar with the language: Click the second option and then click the top option. That is "Settings" --> "Language". I had to luck my way to that. Although, with such a simplistic game, I didn't have to click around much to get the language right. Still annoying.
2.) This game is an "Action Roguelike"...which is somewhat accurate. It's shallow action, and barely roguelike. I'll focus on the action first. The shooting is okay and functions as you would expect. You get a dash that works most of the time with a slow recharge (with no way to speed it up). One really inconsistent thing, is that your bullets can transcend walls and even rooms. I've managed to shoot boxes in another room with my guns. The enemies' projectiles and your grenade do not penetrate the walls. Oh yeah, you have a grenade. But, it's the most watery grenade I've ever used. Don't think of it as a grenade, but rather a limited-range power shot? That's the best I got. The explosion has no radius to it. I had to luck my way into killing multiple enemies with it, and sometimes luck my way killing anything with the grenade.
3.) I have a massive problem with the variety, or the "roguelike" side to this. First, you have very little in the way of enemy types. You got enemy that runs around randomly and shoots projectiles, one that kinda follows you for melee damage, a special reaper type in the third world that kinda teleports and sticks to you, and the bosses. The bosses are piss easy, and all three go down quick. I don't think there is procedural generation to the levels at all. As an experiment, go ahead and play 1-1 over and over, and you'll see it's the exact same layout. I thought I was going crazy, as I literally beat two runs back-to-back and felt a big sense of deja vu with the layouts. I did my experiment, and I got the same layout for 1-1 over and over again. Speaking of same things over and over again, the gun variety was abysmal. My first run, buying out every gun machine I found, I got starting shotgun, plasma pistol, and assault rifle. There was a point where I rolled my starting shotgun again, multiple times. In the second run, I started with an assault rifle (I rescued two people who help give you items at the start of runs, the ONLY sense of meta progression I could find in this game, which is a big problem)...and I ♥♥♥♥ you not, I rolled the same assault rifles on two more occasions. And it's not like you are rolling more powerful variants or anything. As far as I can tell, each gun does roughly the same damage to everyone across the board, with the only variation being what the projectile is, what the gun looks like, how fast it shoots, and how much ammo a clip can hold. I found maybe 5 different weapons in my two full runs and a few quick restarts to try and force out some variety. There are no perks to obtain, the guns do not evolve with time, the enemies do not become harder, and outside of me randomly finding two "prisoners" who will contribute to future runs, there is zero progression.
4.) There are a bunch of QOL stuff that I feel also really hallow the experience. In addition to the game starting in Russian (not trying to be elitist, but if you're going to be multi-lingual as a game, I suggest putting a clear language select at the start of the game), there are just other confounding things. The only setting for sound is a "Music" toggle...which is not a music toggle, but rather the sound toggle. I didn't want to listen to the same five second loop of generic rock, so I wanted to mute it. But, then I had to play the game without sound whatsoever. Not much of a deal, except the only way you can really tell you are taking damage is because your character shouts. There is no feedback otherwise, save for the small UI that doesn't do itself a lot of favors in the explanation department. I don't mind not being outright told things, but it should be intuitive. Speaking of unexplained UI elements, there's a counter on the top right that I can't explain. It's not a death counter, from what I can tell. Another QOL element: you can pick up consumables, like health and grenades, despite being full on these. It doesn't give you extra, so you end up picking up a lot of waste if you're not meticulously leaving these on the ground for later. Final QOL point: No mini-map. I guess if you're not going to engage in procedural generation for the level design, this is not as problematic. Still, a mini-map does help from the odd time you're running around trying to find the exit. It's not hard to tell if you've been in a room, but it's definitely hard to tell which of the rooms it actually is compared to the other rooms (unless it's either the start, the exit, or the rare one with a gun-buying machine in it).
5.) All of the above leads to this damning conclusion: This isn't fun. There's nothing here. It's empty. At best, I can say that it functions and that there is a clear start and end to the game. But, there's nothing motivating me to get from start to end...and I did it twice. I don't see the roguelike in this at all. The meta progression is non-existent (which I understand is more "roguelite", but that's something I really enjoy in these types of games and helps explain my lack of enjoyment). The variety is nil. The difficulty is low. To drive home how empty this game really is, look at the trailer and the screenshots. There's nothing else beyond what you see. You see the entirety of the game, all of the mechanics, and the shallow gameplay in just a short trailer and a few screenshots. These should be a taste, not the entire meal.
Finally, I have to bring up the suspect nature of these games. You'll see here, that there are 10 very generic, almost bot-like positive reviews that were posted all within two days of each other. Beyond this and another negative critique in another language, there is nothing outside of these bot-like positive reviews. No discussion topics for this game, and not even any patch notes which would suggest this was just hashed together and released. All of the games by this "dev" is like this. On their most mixed game, there are accusations that these games are scams. I would highly caution that you stay very much far away from these games, as they are barebones and potentially botted to have positive reviews to inflate its review ranking. I wasn't going to go into this much, but the more I looked into it, the more suspicious all of these games by this developer is.
I am open to discussion from either supporter or, better yet, a developer regarding this. But...I think we know how this story ends.
