Void Scrappers

This game suffers from one of the fundamental problems of all vampire survivor wannabe games; the drop pool. At first the game is fun, upgrades come relatively well as the drop pool is small, but as you unlock, the drop pool increases to the point where you will be running a drone ship and have absolutely no upgrades other than lasers. Or a projectile ship with nothing dropping other than drones, or worse, you get absolutely no upgrades beyond utility. The drop pool nonsense takes a game that was around a 7/10 in the beginning, straight to a 1/10. Sorry, not sorry, it's just not fun starting a run and pulling absolutely nothing, I can burn every banish, and every reroll on one or two levels leaving you at the mercy of RNG for the rest of the run, and it will be UGLY.

It's a run-of-the-mill survivors-style game; go in circles for 30 minutes, choose 1 of 3 upgrades every minute or so, reach the final wave and get obliterated; next run. The majority of players doesn't make it to the final wave even once, but achievement hunters with a little persistence will have an easy time here.

Pretty darn good bullet heaven / surivors-like. Great graphics. The guns are a lot of fun to play around with. Ultimately, the gameplay is somewhat more shallow than Vampire Survivors, but you can 100% it without spending half your life on it, so I think it's pretty cool.

On paper, I shouldn't like this Survivors-like game due to its lack of variety and content... but somehow I ended up really liking it. The ship physics and momentum were spot-on for me, and I found it fun just to turn off my brain and endlessly kite and try out different builds (even if, in the end, there wasn't THAT much room for true creative expression and experimentation). I also like how success may be achievable even without investing in permanent upgrades, because I got my first win early on. So this game does not depend on grinding for stat upgrades, like many others in this genre do. Would recommend this as a casual podcast game.

Lots of characters, enough weapons and weap variations. Little actual variety of enemies, zero different maps / events / dangers (only one environment effect so far?). Also strangely tries to spam bullets and super-tanky enemies at the end of a run, just to ruin it for close ranged drones/chars/weapons. Probably a nice one for casual gamers, not so great for vamp survivors fans. 7-/10.

For the TLDR crowd: [b]buy this[/b]. My verdict is based upon a careful weighing of the pros and cons - of which there are many. PROS: It's an entertaining rogue-lite game, at a near-perfect price. Graphics are simple/retro, music (when low) isn't annoying at all. Gameplay loop is short-to-medium; a typical run is less than 10 minutes. There's a decent sense of progression which has lasted through the roughly 8 hours I've put into it. It gets frenetic / twitch-skill-busy quickly. CONS There isn't a lot of depth, and the simplicity of it - while a PRO in some ways - makes me think I'll play until I've hit all of the (dozen-ish?) achievements and then uninstall. While my PC is substantial, I've been having problems - and I say this to explain the video crashes may or may-not be game-related; I can't tell yet. There are times when mob density and the need to dodge feels a bit unfair. VERDICT: [u]it's well-worth the money[/u]. You'll have fun for ~10 hours, and maybe come back to it later for the ease of gameplay. I've bought a few games from this studio/developer, and most have followed the pattern on display here, and I like it. --- GAMEPLAY LOOP You only need to move, and pick upgrades both in-game and at the menu. Mobs of different speed/capability will drift into the viewable area; the intensity of this increases as the loop progresses. You'll pick up scrap which is similar to XP, and use it to upgrade your existing capabilities/weapons. You'll have bosses joining the fray every minute or so, and when you kill them, you'll have the option of choosing between new weapons or upgrading existing weapons; this ONLY happens at boss death. Thus, you can create a rogue-like build by focusing on dealing particle / explosion / beam / droid damage. The droids are a weapon type that gives you autonomous critters circling your ship and taking out mobs as they can. Some builds seem pretty over-powered, and some in the other direction - but you have to curate the stuff you pick up to get there. RNG will impact this, though some of the permanent upgrades offset it a bit. --- I've already typed too much. I like this game, and I think there are a bunch of players who will, too.

Solid, if basic, bullet heaven. Great art as always from this dev. Good soundtrack too.

A solid survivors-style gameplay loop. Meta-progression is minor and you can definitely win your first run even without it. I got to final boss but didn't beat him, but simply getting there is apparently the win condition. I really enjoyed the movement the most in this game, it is floaty yet snappy and responsive giving you a lot of free-flowing motions you can utilize to avoid shots and enemies. It does drop frames quite badly if you keep going into endless (post-final boss kill, threat 42+) but there also isn't anything pushing you to do so anyways so I didn't mind/care One negative, [b]weapons are horrendously imbalanced[/b], orbitals are impressively weak due to being 'dumb' having no targeting, even the character that gives orbitals homing doesn't make it good enough because they all target the exact same enemy then go on cooldown for the next target. The dash character is the only character that can use orbitals and not be dependent on RNG to win, but only if you find the 'orbitals copy your dash abilities' unique upgrade (which is easy to come by, uniques often take into account what you currently have for appearance rates it seems which is really nice!), this is because the dash character starts with all dash attacks, which are normally exclusively limited to 1 of the dash-attacks. Projectiles and explosions are incredibly OP compared to lasers/orbitals, mostly because there are upgrades that make enemies spawn explosions/projectiles on death, thus scaling off the enemy spawn scaling. Lasers are playable as long as you find the 'laser spawns lasers' upgrade, if not lasers fall off quite rapidly.

I wasn't crazy about this at first but its a cool mix of a shump and vampire survivors and feels different from a standard VS game. Not much content but more than enough to justify the price and figuring out how to get to wave 40 is satisfying. Dont buy this over Brotato, otherwise you could do worse

Great sci-fi horde-survival game. Loved it.