To start off, it’s very fun and has a lot of potential. The destruction and the sense of power feel great, although most of the buildings aren’t destructible yet. The developers are likely adding more later. Right now, only small and medium-sized buildings can be destroyed once you’re big enough or deal enough AOE damage.
The monsters themselves are unique and each has a little origin story on the selection screen. It isn’t much, but it’s a nice touch. The abilities are pretty fun, and they gain more damage or range when you upgrade them, which helps keep your damage and survivability up as enemy get harder and deal more damage to you. Which is especially important in Endless, where after a while even the police start dealing decent damage to you after you get to around level 150 on easy and even lower on harder dificulty settings.
Destruction currently only seems to work on small and medium buildings, and there are still a lot of medium buildings that don’t have destruction physics yet. I suspect that will be fixed later. For now, it’s still fun to watch them crumble after an AOE attack, or after an enemy mortar destroys its own stuff. A good strategy is to bait a mortar into striking a building so you can grab the EXP from it.
The growth rate on each monster is different. The Kraken (the first monster) grows at a mostly consistent rate, but Mech-X, the death robot you unlock later, grows very slowly (why a robot can grow at all is a mystery). Enlil starts off at around twelve feet tall and gets to over twenty feet really quickly.
Each run seems to have predetermined ability boosts. I don’t know if that was intentional, but across all the monsters and about ten different runs on both Endless and Timed, I got the blue EXP crystal boost less than almost any other option, the only option I saw less than that was the size booster.
The best strategy I found for staying alive was to farm EXP as quickly as possible. Kill the cops early, while they’re still a threat. When SWAT rolls up, take them out too, but keep moving to avoid their poison gas. Early in a run, try to stand on top of tanks to destroy them quickly, or just run away if there are too many other enemies around. Once you can select ability boosters, grab all the EXP boosts you can. When an EXP booster isn’t an option, take whatever will help you survive the most. If there are no survival or EXP boosts, pick one for your favorite ability. AOEs are good for getting life orbs quickly, just upgrade the orb collection range every now and then. It might seem like a bad idea to pump EXP boosts early, but it gets seriously out of control fast. You get bigger and tankier sooner, and eventually you can level up every few seconds if you keep spamming your abilities when you can.
The difficulty is pretty balanced. I didn’t play it on Hard, but Normal was tough enough early on and gets easier later once you’re bigger and tankier. Easy is… well, easy, but not too easy. If you get careless, you can still die even early on. Equipping more mutations when you get them ramps the difficulty up pretty fast, but you can kind of cheese it by playing on Easy and selecting as many as you can, less risk, more reward. It still gets harder, just not nearly as hard as it would on Normal, and on Hard I can imagine it would be crazy. The mutations themselves are well balanced enough, giving you good options for a fair difficulty spike.
Since this is Early Access, there are issues that need to be fixed before full release. Nothing is game-breaking, but at least two of them might get you killed. First, the collision boxes are way bigger than they probably should be, The garden beds under the bridge for instance will still stop you completely even if you’re over forty feet tall. There was even a point when I got stuck on top of a destroyed tank, couldn’t move off it, and then got blown up by a mortar and the surrounding enemies. Second, sometimes after selecting an upgrade you just stop moving. You have to stop pressing the movement keys and press them again to start moving. It’s annoying, and it might get you killed if you’re standing in the middle of a bunch of enemies.
Another issue I found, honestly more of a fun glitch than a real problem, is that crowds will sometimes run around structures and their pathing won’t reset when you walk into them, meaning you can walk around a structure and have giant lines of civilians run straight into you instead of redirecting and running away. Funny, but it can be exploited early on in a run.
The only other issue is that movement can feel very clunky. It sort of reminds me of some early 2000s games where the character model plays walking animations, but the turning is slow and you sometimes feel like you’re gliding along the ground rather than walking. Base movement is also very slow, but it can be boosted with ability boosters, so it isn’t that bad. Get bigger or grab the movement-speed boosters and it improves, but you also get more of that sliding feeling.
The cost is a fair price for what you get, and it will help the devs improve the game without making much of a dent in the average person’s wallet. Overall, it’s very fun if you just want to destroy things and waste some time on something that doesn’t need much brainpower. The name of the game is accurate to a tee, and I feel it will only get better over time.
At the time of writing this review, and taking the Early Access state into consideration, I’d give it a solid 6.5 out of 10, with some room to improve.
