ZANZIBART

I don't know if I'll ever be forgiven but I just have to keep trying.

Good stuff, item art is pretty funny, and the gameplay loop is pretty addictive, "one more run" kind of feeling. Runs well on deck without any additional setup, though mouse movement is too sensitive for some of the items (like the wand). Autofire really helps on deck. Also progression seems to be balanced really well, felt like I made more progress every new run, though it took me some time to learn about item purchases in between runs, and of the in-game shop as well. I highly recommend this game, especially for the price.

i zanzibarted

This is an interesting idea but it ultimately is just mostly boring. Using your score from previous run to invest into the next, and snowballing like that, is interesting, but it can also lead to going backwards if you're swapping characters around and pick a bad one or just have super bad luck with shop choices during the run. On top of that, there is no way (that I can see) to speed up the early parts of the run, nor is there ever any difference in it. This is true of a number of bullet heavens, but it's especially egregious here as you end up spending 5+ minutes every run just doing nothing but running in a circle picking up the money. When you aren't "too powerful" for a section, it's pretty typical of other bullet heaven games, although it's made a little bit worse by the scrolling screen. You basically do the same "circle around" movement you do in all the other games, except you have to made sure to do it only in the top part of the screen, so you have time to grab the money (xp) before it drops off the screen and is forever gone. If that happens too much you lose the stat check of the game even faster, so it really limits what your choices are. Overall, it's an OK concept but I just don't see anything worth your time. It's so restrictive and so repetitive in a genre that is always trying to overcome the repetitive nature of short, repeated runs with novel gimmicks, here there's just nothing to make it more dynamic, and a lot of the other designs make it less interesting than Vamp Survivors or any of the others like it. My constructive feedback points would be: The scrolling screen is unique, but the money / xp going into the void makes the player movement very limited. Find a more interesting alternative so players can feel free to use the whole screen instead. The repetitiveness of starting completely trivial 5+ minutes of gameplay runs over and over needs a fix. A game speed multiplier makes the most sense to me, but there are other ways to handle it (like "checkpoints" you could start at further in which give you an approximate score and upgrades to choose from if you've reached them before). A lot of the weapon and character balance just seems awful. I personally think "character facing" instead of "mouse facing" weapons are always too weak to justify the downsides, and here that seems especially true - every one I tried was just worse than basically every other normal weapon. Maybe they're designed around "optimal" upgrades or synergies but in that case they're just always going to be the worst choice anyway.

Fun shooter scrolling game made with a lot of love

pros: * fun gameplay loop * buying upgrades with your previous score can give you a more custom build/ snowball early stages * good variety of upgrades * price:fun ratio is good. Cons: * quitting the game or just having a bad run sets that snowball to zero * any leftover score doesn't carry over, you use it or lose it. * Accidentally hit menu while paused once, ruining one snowball, wouldn't mind a confirmation window.