Análises recentes de TheVampire100

This is one of the most fun games that I have played in my life. From the same developers that brought my favourite deckbuilder Monster Train, we now have a new rogue-like with great mechanics and absurd build options.

In Inkbound you play as the Needless, a sentient ink creature that was just born and is pushed into a cruel and dying world. The people of this world struggle to survive because their world, which is made up of books and stories, gets ruined by monsters and villains who take the ink from the book, basically erasing parts of the world. Your job is to defeat those villains and take back the ink and maybe find a more permanent solution to this problem. Or not.

The gameplay is centered around turn-based combat. Your character will open up different locations during his run, alternating between a battle location and an event location. Battles happen in circular arenas with new enemies spawning in each round. Your character has access to five different skills, three are exclusive to his class, the other two are drafted from a random selection each run. Using an ability costst energy, some abilities cost more than one energy point. Additionally, everything except your most basic ability will have a cooldown, so you have to manage both cooldowns and energy costs. Movement however is free up to a specific limit and is not tied to energy.
Each ability also has thre upgrade slots which you can fill with all kinds of improvements exclusive to each ability. Some upgrades simply improve damage or they might give you shields, apply debuffs and much more. There are some great choices here and upgrades are dividied into three different rarities, with the rarer ones usually having very strong effects.
You can also "ascend" abilities. Each ability has three different ascensions, from which you can pick oe, usually after kiling a boss. These ascensions completely change how abilities work and help you to specialize your build. For example, one ascension could focus on pure physical damage while another instead reduces direct damage but adds fire to the attack.

Additionally you can aquire a collection of passive items, which will usually increase your stats but also have all kinds of extra effects. Items are divided into different item sets and collecting enough items from the same set will give you an additional effect as long as you have items of this set. You have however an item limit, so you cannot hoard everything you find. After beating a boss, you have access to "shredders" which will destroy an item of your choice but give you double the points to the relevant item set. This allows players to think carefully which items they don't need but want to keep the special effect for the set.

The game has 8 different classes, from which you start with 4 and the other four have to be unlocked through gameplay. Each class is incredibly unique not only in their abilities but also their passive effect, which changes completely your strategy. Each class also allows for a wide variety of builds, which is great and gives the player many hours of experimentation and gameplay.
Just like Monster Train, the game expects you to break it. The base difficulty is hard and gets even harder with the extra challenge ranks, which add all kinds of nasty modifiers and challenge buffs to enemies. Understanding the game helps you to create insane builds that let you feel like a god.
The high difficulty can be off putting for more casual players however that struggle with these types of games.
The soundtrack is okay. Personally I liked the music of Monster Train better but it's alright.

However, there is one thing that I should mention since it could bother people. The game was designed as an open multiplayer game in mind. This means you will have an open lobby with other players running around until you jump into an actual run. The game features a lot of cosmetics, emotes and other stuff that you usally wouldn't see in a rogue-like. You can play the game completely alone, even offline but the developers main focus is the online art and the game feels like this. If you are the kind of person that does not want to interact with other players at all, skip this. While you can play offline, you will notice how empty the actual lobby is, which was designed to hold many players at once but barely has any NPCs to interact with. If you like however to customize your character and show it off, then you will love this kind of thing.
But of course, the main reason to buy this game should be the gameplay and I have to say, it is absolutely fantastic. And I still haven't tried out all the things the game has to offer.

Hero's Hour is in my opinion a great execution of a strategy game. I had so many fun matches with this game and I still haven't played all the factions.
The game can be easily described as "Heroes of Might and Magic but as Autobattler". The core gameplay is directly taken from the HoMM franchise and feels very close to HoMM3 (which many consider to be the best one in the franchise) but it also takes some inspirations from HoMM5. The combat here is however done as an Autobattler. You have some minor control over the battle, mainly through spells, but besides that you will watch your units and the enemy units fight it out by themselves. So the main strategic decisions are mostly done on a macro level, deciding what buildings to pick, what units to create and what structures you should take on the minimap.

As you would expect from a HoMM clone, you have several factions, each with their own unique buildings, units and even special game mechanics. The creator of this game made sure that each faction feels very unique in their approach of playstyle and what strategies you could try. For example, Wyld is all about summoning small fairy-like "Anima" units, which are weak but come in big numbers, often replacing dead units. You can also gather many of them inside your town to recruit "grizzlies" over time and you can overgrow mines, which will have units to protect them and produce wood together with their usual resources.
Another faction for example is Iczta Enclave, a sort of Mayan lizardmen faction. They create a lot of smaller units and ca either tame beasts as units or hunt them for artifacts. They also summon a hydra god over time, which they can speed up by sacrificing artifacts.

There 11 of such factions in the game and I love that they are not just pure copies of the HoMM factions (although some come very close to it).
Each faction has their own heroes, which are generally divided into two subclasses, which can be generally be considered a magical or physical class. The heroes in this game are actually the highlight of the gameplay. They have their own individual skill trees, which unlike the HoMM series, is not simply randomized. While skills overlap for heroes, they still are distinct enough in their playstyle, especially since each faction has access to faction-exclusive skills.
Your hero levels up through battle or from resources and structures on the map. This increases their stats and lets you select one of their aviable skills. Each skill can also be leveled up but you need to have a higher level if you want to get higher skill levels. Building your hero correctly makes a major difference to your strategy and also gives you a good idea what you should aim for with your town.
The game features also neutral heroes on the map, which provide resources and artifacts if killed but will never claim any structures or towns.
Besides the faction units, there are also a ton of neutral units on the map, which provide you with XP if killes but mainly serve as a blockade for other structures or important pathways.

To round things up, there are also a ton of different spells in the game. Some summon extra units, some deal damage or they buff or debuff units. There is a bit of variety here, although some spells might feel a little bit similiar. Spells are important to influence combat but have cooldowns and cost mana.

Now about the graphics. As you can tell by the screenshots, the game isn't goodlooking. It uses a very simplified pixel-style, which makes it sometimes hard to distinguish units on the battlefield. Since this is an autobattler, it's not much of a big problem but it can be somewhat offputting at times. The Ui is also very basic, it serves it purpose and is at least not clunky or ugly but it could have been better. But it's easy to select your desired heroes and towns whenever you want, so it's good in that regard.

The sound design is actually not that bad. The music is fitting for the fantasy setting, although slightly repetitive for a game with so many factions and heroes. Unit sounds are also pretty generic but shouldn't bother you too much.

What could be however more of a bother would be the lack of online multiplayer. There is local multiplayer in the form of hotseat (players take alternate turns on the game) but nothing in regard of online functionaility and from what I've heard, there are no plans to ever do this. You can play online with Steam Remote Play Together, which is basically the most basic way of playing multiplayer. On the world map, this is less of a problem, but during combat it makes spells less appealing since both players have to take turns on casting (which is, I guess, closer to HoMM).

In terms of Ai, it is also a bit lacking. The AI difficulty is simply defined by how many more units and resources the AI player gets, not actual intelligence. For people that hate "cheating AI", whis can be a real problem. Outside of cheating, the AI is lackluster, often ignoring structures and always going for the most basic strategy. I wish there was more here but there isn't.

However, I have so much fun with the gameplay itself, that I don't even take notice from the Ai or how bad it is. I have mainly fun by trying out different builds and then steamrolling the Ai if possible.
Overall, this game is very fun if you like a lot of content and want a game similiar to HoMM but not exactly like it.

This was very fun but way too short. For the price, it is okay but I wish there was a lot more, mainly because the story seems so interesting.

The game world is set in an incredibly dark dystopian cyberpunk city in which the bodies of dead people are reanimated and turned into mindless cyborg labour drones. You play as Anala, one of those zombie cyborgs. During an incident at your workplace, you suddenly regain sentience. Having lost most of your memories and trying to find out what exactly happened to you, you escape the facility and look for answers, hunting down the only person that you recognize.

This game is a mix between a stealth game and a fast-paced precision platformer. Anala is not very durable since she is mainly composed of rotting flesh and cheap cyberware, so guards in this game, armed with laser rifles, will quickly kill you. On the other hand, you can also quickly kill guards if you sneak up on them. The stealth mechanics involve sound, which is created if you run, but not while you sneak. You can also throw objects to create sounds which guards will investigate. You can even find grenades later, which not only are loud but also handy to dispose of multiple guards very easily.
The platforming of the game is sort of a parkour system. Whenever you jump on a platform, Anala will grab the ledge and with some timing you can catapult yourself further away in the desired direction.
What I like about this game is how clever the levels are designed. Every level was hand crafted in a way that you can either use stealth or the parkour mechanics to get around enemies, leaving it up to the player how he wants to progress through a level. The game also has a built in speedrun timer, which tracks your fastest time and even compares it to the dev time. Beating all the dev times is the ultimate goal here for completionists.

In each level is also a hidden key card, which unlocks a challenge level. These are not required to finish the game and instead test your platforming skills.

What really surprised me for such a cheap game are the animated cutscenes. The game has not many, but the ones that exist are very good and really underline the horror of this story. The art design was really well done here.
However, on the oppsite side, the sound design is not very good. The music is very generic but worse, it does not even fit the cyberpunk setting. It sounds more like something of a fantasy game or some spanish soap opera. I guess the dev used royalty free music here, but some electronic music would fit much better with the aesthetic of the game world.

What also could sometimes lead to frustration are the controls. The game constantly shifts between super fluid and clunky controls and I don't know whsy. Most of the time you can speed through the parkour sections very easily but at other times you struggle with the timings and the character goes not the way she is supposed to. This is more appearent in the very final level in the game, which requires you to do a massive platforming challenge in a limited amount of time. I don't like these kind of time restricted sections in video games and it feels bad here too.

Besides those issues I think it's a good enough game for this low price, especially if you like dark cyberpunk stories. But keep in mind, that the story is rather short and leaves you with the desire for more.

I bought this mainly for nostalgia reasons and boy was it worth it. This was the first PC game that I ever played and loved. Pro Pinball was a series of virtual pinball tables from the 90s and Timeshock was the most popular one of those.
This is a remake of the Timeshock table, even if it's not in the title. The Pro Pinball tables were known back in the day for realistic physics, something which was rare in video games then but is actually pretty common nowadays. Timeshock is a masterpiece of a table, with very fun objectives to achieve, awesome soundtrack and very cool gimmicks.
The game even features a bit of a story that is deeply integrated into it's gameplay. There is a shockwave (the titular timeshock) moving backwards through time, erasing everything along its way. Your job is to go to the beginning of time and initiate a counter shockwave to stop the first one. You do this by traveling through different periods of time and collecting pieces of the shattered time crystal, which you have to restore.
Liek I said before, this translates directly into the gameplay. Your objective is to get the crystal fragments and you do this by initating a multiball. To get a multiball you have to hit the spinner on the table, which lights up a bar on the table. If the bar is fully lit, any ball that goes through the spinner is locked in the time machine. Lock three balls and you initiate time frenzy, the multi ball mode of this table. During time frenzy you have to shoot the ramps as often as possible to achieve jackpots, which give massive points but if you get enough, you also can collect the crystal fragment by shooting the big crystal in the center of the table.
You also have to travel through different timezones but you need fuel for the time machine first. You can get this by playing different "exploration" minigames. These have always different objectives. Shoot the ramps, shoot the spinner, hit the jets and so on. Once you have four crystal fragments, you travel to the dawn of time, geting a five ball multi ball, which allows you to win the game and achieve the "master of time" ending. This also locks your fastest time for the leaderboard.
Of course you also can simply play for the highest score, as usual in pinball.

Compared tot he original release, you now have more perspectives to choose from, much better graphics (although not entirely up to modern standards but who cares, it's pinball) and a new "glass off" mode which allows you to move the ball with the mouse (if that's what you want).
This is really a great title that all pinball fans should get.
Only complaint here is, that the title is not "Timeshock" and neither contains" Timeshock", which gives off the impression that other Pro Pinball tables might or will be also included but nothing has been done in this direction. It probably was planned but never finished.

This is quite the entertaining puzzle game but also very difficult. The premise is that you play as a small girl who is obsessed with bunnies, so much that she chases one down the rabbit hole.
The gameplay is quite simple but hard to master. You have to chase down and corner bunnies in order to catch them. This starts out fairly easy, just chase bunnies into a dead end and you can collect it. However, as the game goes on, you will encounter more open-ended levels with a lot of free space where the bunnies can evade you. You also will be able to use new tools in specific levels, like a trap that catches a bunny that walks over it or a pickaxe that can dig out walls.
The solutions to puzzles are not always obvious and often there is more than one way to solve a room.
There are different burrows that introduce new mechanics over time but one mechanic that you learn early on is especially important.
If you can manage to chase two bunnies in the same spot, they create a "bunny stack" and give you a baby bunny. These baby bunnies are needed to unlock some helpful tools for the game.
You will notice, however, that most levels have only one bunny, so what can you do? And this is where the difficulty of the game spikes really hard. You can chase down bunnies in the same holes that you use to enter the next level. Doing this allows you to move a bunny from one level to the next level. This works for stacked bunnies as well and you can increase the stack further.
Finding routes to move stacks from level to level until you reach the bottom of a burrow is the ultimate goal but it's also a lot harder than just catching the bunnies.
But there are even more crazy ways to stack your bunnies. Using the pickaxe, you can open walls to adjacent levels, so you can now mix bunnies of different burrows.
The complexity of the puzzles is absurd and the cute art style and premise hide the depth that this game brings to the table. If you are looking for a real challenging puzzle game, give this one a spin.

A surprisingly entertaining arena rogue-like with a unique concept. Windowkill has the unique idea that its entire gameplay is seated on your desktop inside various windows that appear.
During a run you will find yourself inside a constantly shrinking window. In order to increase the side of your window again, you have to shoot the edges of it. This gives the whole window a moving dynamic because it will close in on you again, which means you are constantly moving the window around the screen. Enemies will constantly spawn outside the vision of your window and will close in on you, a smaller window means you have less room to evade them. Contact damages you but some enemies will also fire bullets.
Defeated enemies drop money, which you need to improve your abilities. At any point during a run you can open up the shop inside a seperate window and buy upgrades for your character. These increase move speed, bullet amount, attack speed or improve your ability to increase the window size. The shop is randomized and replaces bought options with new ones, so there is a bit of RNG involved here.

Over time, the enemey spawns will increase in intensity with new and stronger enemies appearing and even bosses start to spawn. Bosses are special because they spawn in their own window, so you always know where they are but you also can only attack them if your window overlaps with their window. Beating a boss drops a star which can be used in the special perk shop to buy one of three powerful abilities. The first one, peer, allows you to create a new permanent window to see a bigger part of the screen. The second ability creates a damaging zone. Both of those abilities can be moved aroudn since they are their own window.
The third ability is unqiue for each character class you can play.

There are also some unlocks that you can get, mostly cosmetic stuff like a new background or new music but you also unlock new characters to play with. The game also has some secrets for you to discover that go a little bit beyond what you would expect. I can say for myself that I was surprised how much deeper the actual game goes.
That being said, this is still a simple arena shooter, so don't expect too much. For the price it is a very cool and entertaining.

One thing that annoys me however is the lack of upgrade descriptions. Some of the upgrades you can buy are not easy to identify and you have to buy them and figure out what they do. I think some basic descriptions would do wonders here. The mentioned secrets are also not easy to identify, I only found about them out by accident. But since they make up a god chunk of the gameplay I wish the game was more open about it (but I guess then they wouldn't be secrets anymore).

Dreamscaper is a game, that I can play for a round and then put away again for a longer period of time because the gameplay is so dull. In my opinion, this game is full of wasted potential and it is really sad to see a game with so much production value goind down the drain because they didn't design the gameplay good enough.

The premise of the game is really cool, you play as Cassidy, a young woman who has moved recently to a bigger city struggles with making new aquaintances. During the night,however you have strong, lucid dreams which are plagued by nightmares, so you do your best to fight them off, quite literally. During the day you interact with NPCs, making new friends while also looking for inspirations that you can use to unlock new items for your dreams.
This is a really nice idea but sadly the game does not make the best use of it.

The majority of the game you will spent inside your dreams, which are the rogue-like gameplay of the game. It is similiar to The Binding of Isaac, you have a map with multiple rooms and you have to find and fight the boss, so you can reach the next floor. Rooms often have enemies, which you have to defeat if you want to progress. There are also rooms with items, shops and even puzzle rooms.
The combat is somehwat similiar to Hades, you have a dodge ability, a normal attack combo depending on your weapon, an alternate attack for your weapon, a ranged weapon but also a shield, two special abilities and even an extremely strong ability that charges between rooms. The combat itself is actually quite good, I like that your dodge and shield are also items that you can find and equip, which change how these work. Overall, there are a lot of items to consider your build. You also have passive items, keepsakes, which add some nice stat bonuses to your character but these are rarer than your active items.
All items you find are inspired by stuff that Cassidy experiences during her waking hours. Paper planes, a baseball bat, a slingshot, boxing gloves but also some fantasy stuff that she experiences through television, books and comics. Cassidy is an adorable nerd, that likes a lot of stuff that you would like too. One of my favourite items int he game are the laser eyes. Each item has a small description from Cassidy herself, which emphasizes her dorkiness and makes her more adorable. That's also probably the most narrative you get with the game.

This is the point, where the cracks start to show and you notice the very heavy limitations of the gameplay. The dynamic between the waking world and the dream world is very poorly designed. When I described before, that Cassidy uses real life examples for her arsenal in dreams, you might think that this leads to a cool feature where she experiences something new during the day and gets an idea for a new item for the night. This would have been a cool concpet but instead you just interact with a glowing point that randomly appears in one of the few locations you can visit during the day and this will give cassidy the idea. It would have been cool if we would have a cuitscene, in which Cassidy creates a paper plane during her work shift because she is bored but instead you just click one spot and now you have it. This works the same with all the unlocks and stat upgrades. Every unlock is done by spending a currenc yat a very specific location, which is just a menu that you scroll through and click on something. While this is very common in the industry, it is annoying that you have to travel between multiple locations to do so and they really could have done something better with it.
NPCs are also aweful to interact with. While I don't expect every game to be like Hades and have a meaningful interaction after each run, you bareley get to interact with NPCs at all. You cannot even talk with them for the most time, the option to talk to them is only aviable at very random and rare times. The only way to gain meaningful progress is to craft some presents and gift them. But each NPC has their own preferences, which they will only tell you on those rare moments when you can talk to them otherwise you have to guess what they like. The NPCs might as well be backgroudn because that's how they behave most of the time.
If you get a higher friendship level, you get one cutscene that talks a little bit more of their relationship with Cassidy and suddenly you realize that Cassidy is living another life that you are not aware off. There is talk about work, going to events or that Cassidy likes to draw comics. And you canot experience any of that. The player constantly has the feeling he is missing out on some really interesting story aspects but the devs didn't care to implement a real interactive world.

The dream world has similiar issues but dor a different reason. While the dream world is more fleshed out, which is obviously because it’s the main part of the game, it suffers from repetitiveness. You will soon notice, that the enemy types on each floor are actually the same, with just some new attacks, mainly that they now have elemental attacks.
The dream world has some really good looking environments but those repeat over and over, often during the same dream. Even many of the weapons feel similiar.

I really want to say more positive things about this game because it has some great ideas and even some good QoL mechanics, that other games could use too. For example you can always just open the map and travel to any previously visited room. No teleporter needed, just the map. This is really handy and it sucks that the only game, that has something like that, isn't really that much fun. The idea between the waking world and the dream world is really interesting but that they didn't make the best use of it makes the game so dull.

I think the game is at least worth checking out if it's on sale, since it has a good combat system but the problem is, the current price does not reflect the fun gameplay experience, that you would expect from it.

Against the Storm is a city-builder rogue-like that is incredibly fun. It's set in a fantasy world in which it never stops raining. In regular cycles there are incredibly strong storms that destroy everything. The only safe place is the Smoldering City, which is located at a volcano.
You play as a viceroy, your job is to build several settlements that provide goods for the Smoldering City. But be aware, the patience of the queen has it's limits and you have to hurry if you don't want to get called back.

The game is divided into two gameplay sections. The map is where you do meta decisions. Choose locations for your settlements, upgrade the Smoldering City with goods you have provided and look for anything that could help you on the map. A full run is called a cycle and when time runs out, the world will be destroyed by the blightstorm, ending your current run and generating a new worldmap. The goal is to reach different seals that are scattered on the map. These seals are supposed to imprison old, malevolent gods that are responsible for the blightstorms, however the seals have been broken and your job is to reforge them.
Building an actual setlement is a sub-run of the cycle. Settlements are the core gameplay and the city-builder aspect of Against the Storm. Your goal is to reach a specific number of reputation (essentially victory points). However, the impatoience of the queen constantly rises and if it reaches it's maximum, the settlement is considered a failure. You can still attempt other settlements but each settlement you build will advance the time, which means the end of the cycle grows closer.
To get reputation, you have various options to choose from. The most straightforward is to do tasks that are provided by the Queen. These taks give you various rewards in formof resources, citizens or cornerstones but you will always get a full reputation point. Each full reputation point will reduce the impatience of the Queen and on certain thresholds you will also get a blueprint of a new building.
Blueprints are the bread and butter of settlements, you only start with a handful of basic buildings that allow you to collect all types of natural resources and craft basic items but they are also very inefficient. Effiency is very important in AtS. Each type of building has a star rating depending on how efficient they are. Good ratings reduce the amount of resources to craft an item and also the time it takes. Because of this system, there are multiple buildings that can produce the same goods but with different efficiencys, which means that you are not too much reliant on RNG to craft an item you need.
The same applies to the crafting recipes too. Most crafzing recipes have alternate resources that you can select to craft them. This allows you to toggle between resources you have access to or resources you don't want to get uses. It's a good system that allows for huge felxibility in your settlement, so you can adapt to the circumstances and what resources you have aviable.
The game has 5 different fantasy races and each one has their own preferences when it comes to food, living conditions and amenities. When you provide the goods they like, they will get happyness, which is called resolve in this game. Happy citizens will eventually generate reputation for you but the more citizens and the more reputation you already have, the harder it gets for them to generate more. This means you are constantly providing for the needs they have, trying to get a good resolve value. Having negative resolve on the other hand means that citizens are unhappy with their circumstances and will eventually leave the settlement. This is best avoided because it increases the impatience of the queen faster.
Each race in the game also is good at certain works. Depending on their work station, they either generate more resources or more resolve.
Players can also attract various merchants to the settlement, which allow you to sell goods and buy resources you need. They also provide blueprints or cornerstones.
Cornerstones are passive items and these are the true game changers for your settlement. Cornerstones can have all kinds of benefits, increased production, better walking speed for workers, bigger storage for buildings and so on. It's important to get cornerstones that help directly with the industry you have planned for your settlement because they can increase the output of your buildings massively. Even a single increase in production can already make ahuge difference.

A core concept of the game is hostility. It's meant as a rising difficulty modifier that you have to manage. Hostility increases with time, citizens and each glade you open up in the woods but it decreases with your hearth and the impatience of the Queen. Hostility decreases resolve from citizens but once the storm hits, it also has various nasty effects depending on how much hostility has already accumulated. Each map you play, has different difficulty modifiers, both positive and negative. These are active during the different seasons of the game. During drizzle you have positive effects happening, during the storm, all the negative modifiers are actie and some are only active once you reached a specific amount of hostility. You can temporarily decrease hostility by burning more food in the hearth.

As the players opens up more of the map with his woodcutters, he will encounter different types of glades. Glades provide more resources but they also contain different events. Events need resources to be resolved but provide good rewards if done so. Depending on the type of glade, there are more dangerous events that, if left alone, will have consequences for your settlement, but even working on them can negatively affect you. These types of events provide however very good rewards, either in the form of a big amount of resources or by giving you a permanent buff.

The game has alot of content and I still haven't talked about everything, for example you can use rain water to boost buildings but that also has the chance to infect them. There are so many mechanics that you can play with and plan your strategy around.
And the soundtrack is so damn good. It's an atmospheric orchestral music that conveys the feeling you have while playing. During the light rain seasons you have a somber-like melody, you feel safe but than the melody begins to rise as the storm comes, it gets louder and louder, drowning out every other noise and you hear a trumpet in the background as thunder strikes. I love it when the music fits perfectly the setting and that certainly is the case here.
If you like city-builders, try out this game. It's really addicting.

Modern games are often plagues by terrible remasters, which barely add anything new, only slightly touch the graphics and want 60$ again for a game that they have probably worked a month on.
Not Risk of rain returns. This is how you do a remake of a video game. From the graphics, to the gameplay, everything was improved to modern standards.
If you haven't played Risk of rain yet, let me fill you in. In this game you play as one of many survivors from the UES Contact Light, a freight starship that was supposed to deliver cargo across the galaxy. However, when the ship came to close to Petrichor V, the inhabitants decided to attack the ship, which resulted in it's crash. the natives are extremely hostile to the survivors of the crash and your only hope of escaping this hell is by reaching the crashed Contact Light and using an emergency shuttle back home. In order to survive you have to use the scattered cargo chests that are everywhere on the planet. These contain all kinds of weapons, trinkets and artifacts that help you to survive this hell.

The gameplay of Risk of Rain is simple: Time is difficulty. The longer you take during a run, the harder the game gets. It will throw more and harder enemies at you, elite variants of regular enemies start to spawn and stage bosses start to spawn as regular enemies. Each stage you have to find a teleporter. If you activate it, you have to survive for 90 seconds, during these 90 seconds a boss will spawn and all enemy spawns will increase in intensity. Once the timer runs out and you have killed the boss, you can leave the stage and enter the next one. You repeat this until you eventually reach the crashed starship where the final boss resides that you have to defeat. One cool aspect about this game is that if you have the feeling you lack the items to beat the boss, you can use the stage before the final boss to loop back to the beginning for more loot. The game still gets harder but you could come out more powerful.

In each stage there are several chests and containers to be found. To open a chest you need mones, which is dropped by killed enemies. A chest contains a random item, which comes in three rarities. White items are plentiful and provide basic improvements, green items are dropped more rarely but always from bosses and big chests. These have more impactful changes to your character. The last item tier are red items which have a very low chance to replace any type of item. Red items have icredibly powerful effects that are often game changers. One item can for example give you the chance to fire three homing rockets that do massive damage or another item could summon ghosts from killed enemies.
There are a ton of different items but not all are aviable from the start. You have to reach certain milestones and beat challenges to unlock them. But even with all the items you get, your bet tool will be your skill because these monsters get really nasty really fast. It is important to stay mobile and evade as much damage as possible.

The game offers a big variety of different characters. When you start you will have only access to two of them, Commando and Huntress. Commando is a fast shooting soldier that can shoot through multiple enemies or stun them for a short duration. Huntress can move freely while shooting and also throws a laser glaive which bounces between enemies. All the characters frot he original Risk of rain are coming back but there are also three new characters. Artificer is a returning character from Risk of rain 2, the 3D sequel of the original game. She is a mage-like character that can throw fireballs and lightning. There are also two new originalk characters, Pilot and Drifter. Pilot is a character with high mobility thanks to his parachute. He can knock enemies up to shoot them down with his fast gun. Drifter is a very interesting character. He can print his own items that last only a short time.

If you have played RoR before, you will find out that there are many more items, new monsters and even a few new stages. Each character now has also new alternate skills, just like Risk of Rain 2. These can be unlocked by a new game mode, the Providence Trials. These are in essence minigames that you can play. There is quite the variety of minigames here, from races, to shooting ranges and other stuff. You usually have to reach a target score for your unlocks but you can also try to break a record if you want.

Overall, this game is fantastic. If you loved the original game, you will love this to and if you like rogue-likes with strong item builds, you will also love this game. Don't let the pixel graphics fool you, this game ha s alot of depth and replayability.

Roboquest is an amazing FPS with rogue-lite elements and fast paced action. In this game you play as a guardian robot, tasked with reclaiming a city that has been overrun by evil robots.
The game features an intense gameplay focusing on movement and gunplay. Movement in this game feels amazing, it is very fluid and has many different options to choose from. You can chain these moevement patterns together for maximum speed. Dash across the map, then slide for a quick speed boost, jump directly afterwards on an enemy head and use the momentum to launch even higher to get on a platform. It's really cool how well these fit together and how fluid the gameplay feels thanks to that.
Maintaining a high speed is very important since at the end of each level you get a rating based on how many enemies you have killed and how fast you were, so to get the best rating you have to kill most enemies as fast as possible. Getting a high rating isn't just for show, you get a currency at the end that you can use to pay at shops.

The gunplay is also fantastic. The game has alot of different guns and the developers made sure that each one feels unique and impactful. You have basic weaponry like handguns, assault rifles and shotguns but you also get some crazy guns like a lightning assault rifle or a cannon that fires massive, exploding snowballs. These weapons have all their own abilities but additionally they can also get randomized abilities. Weapons with higher rarity have more special effects and in some cases they may even have a secondary firing mechanic. Weapons also have levels, which decide how strong the damage of the weapon is. The level of a weapon is defined by the level it drops in, so you will switch out weapons often to stay on an even level. You can also upgrade your weapon in a shop if you had a very good weapon drop that you don't want to lose. By default you can carry only two weapons and the game has a unqiue mechanic to encourage player using both weapons frequently. When you use a weapon during combat, the other weapon in your backpack automatically reloads. Speaking of ammo, ammo is unlimited, so you never run out.

Additionally to weapons, the game also uses a character class and perk system. There are six different classes in the game and each class has their own upgrade perks as well as a few common perks that all classes share. The class perks can even be upgraded further with two different upgrades. During your run you get experience for killing enemies and every time you level up you can select one perk of a random selection from your aviable perks. All perks stack with each other and the generic perks can even be obtained multiple times. Perks generally affect eoither your ability, your weapons or your character in general. Choosing your perks carefully defines what kind of build you will be going for.

During your runs you can also get some items, either from chests or from the shop. You won't get many items during a run but they provide nice passive boosts to your character. They also stack with your perks, which means you can improve your build even further.

The game has a few metaprogression elements as well. Enemies have a chance to drop wrenches, which can be used to buy permanent upgrades at the base between runs. These upgrades generally increase the amount choices in chests and in stores and also increase the chances for stores appearing. There are also a few upgrades that apply directly for your character, like extra health for example. There are also sectret levels in the game and beating those unlocks crystals, which, when activated from your base, provide a passive bonus but also increase the amount of elite enemies you will face during your run. And you can find some friendly robots during your runs, usually at some secret locations, which will give you a quest. If you finish those quests, you get a gadget in return, which is a permanent item that you can activate or deactivate at your base.

The games art design mirrors the looks of a comic book, even the cutscenes are designed in that way. Character models use cell-shading and sound effects are written out on the screen. It is a cool look that I personally like.
The soundtrack, done by Noisescream, features heavy metal music and electronic sounds, a fitting choice for a futuristic action game full of robots and metal violence. It's an absolute banger to listen to.

Overall I would recommend this game to people who love shooters with fast and intense action and also like rogue-lite elements. I want to point out at the end, this is a FPS first and a rogue-lite second. You have more focus on the action part of the game and your actual skill in shooting and dodging than creating a broken build that carries your weak ass. There are some broken builds in this game but it's not the main focus. If that sounds like fun to you, go ahead and buy this, you won't regret it.