I've been playing this game since its previous incarnation, "Infinitroid". It's improved quite a bit since then as well.
Weapon Hacker is a charming-enough 'metroidvania' roguelike. Controls are responsive, the view is clear. Some of the enemies are kinda cute too (until you messily splorch'em), googly eye and all.
You play a bright yellow hazard suit (presumably with some kind of disposable employee or maybe clone in it) that has a gun. As inferred by the title, throughout your runs you find mods, batteries and additional weapon types, and can, in the weapon menu, make presets to swap between them (and eventually combine up to three weapons), freely installing as many mods as your batteries currently allow (these can be shared across all weapons at once, or set to an individual one). They don't discharge, it's just "mod space"/capacity.
> Naturally this means by endgame you may be firing a six-wide fan of electrified flamethrower from a gun that leaves your hand in the firing direction and homes towards enemies after it bounces off the walls... and a bunch of lasers and wall-crawlers too for good measure all at the same time.
There are also traversal items, generally three primary ones (one per facility sector) and often one additional one per sector behind a missile door or in a hidden area. Missiles early on are more of a traversal thing for this reason; you want them to get to the goodies though enough enemies packed together can refund the shot (or more) later. The gear ranges from a grub suit for crawling to double jumps, high-jumps, lava shielding and so on.
Some items and weapons can be obtained more than once either through secret areas or through multiple facilities (same run, new facility, increased difficulty), while some like a second set of high jump boots do nothing, every air jump is one more jump in the air, and you could have three of the same weapon equipped all at once (this is kinda good for the saws so you can set an 'inner layer' with knockback and an outer layer that happily lets things in.)
At this time Weapon Hacker is both less complex and extensive than A Robot Named Fight (we were going to have to go there, the comparison's impossible to avoid), for good or ill. Easier to learn and master, tighter controls (partly because there's less of them), but also less depth to discover.
Two negatives though:
-The music is rather generic and gets repetitive quickly. So you'll probably want to turn that down.
-As a roguelike the typical RNG screwjobs are ever-present; some runs you'll be on your sixth bullet-speed mod and haven't seen a half-heart drop in 10+ rooms, while in other runs you'll have two spreads, a range and a repeater upgrade with batteries five minutes in.
Overall It's a simple enough, enjoyable game you can play a run or two of when you've got some time without having to invest hours when trying to do anything. You probably won't play it for ten hours straight, but it's easy to come back to for much the same reasons.
We all need a few games in our collections that are friendly to such casual breaks and this is one of them.
