Nylige anmeldelser av TheVampire100

Before I go into this review, let me warn you that it will have some mild spoilers. Nothing big but the way the game is designed it is meant to be discovered by yourself. Some people don't want to jump completely blind into a game, which is why I split the review into two halfs, the first half is spoiler free and just adresses the surface level of the game while the other half will address some of the secrets that the game has.

In Void Stranger you play as Grey, a woman who is looking for an important person to her. Her search brings her to a giant hole that connects to the Void, a deep realm of multiple layers full of monsters, hazards and alien geometries. Normal rules don't apply here as you quickly learn.
The gameplay is relatively simple, the game is divided into 255 stages and in each stage you have to reach the stairs to get to the next stage. Your only tool to help you is a magic rod that you find on the first floor which allows you to pick up a single floor tile and place it on an empty spot. It's pracitcally like Minecraft, pick up a block and place it somewhere else. With this tool you can bridge gaps that you normally couldn't cross but there is a trick to it. You can only face into a direction if you have moved towards it and you can only pick up the tile in front of you. This means you cannot turn around on the spot, so you need to find sectionswith three tiles in a row if you want to pick one up or at least two tiles, if you want to put a tile down in that direction. It takes a little time to get used to this concept but once you understand it, it feels natural.
As you progress through the depths of the Void you will start to encounter monsters. These monsters kill you if they touch you but they often have very predictable movement patterns that you can abuse. Many puzzles in this game world revolve around navigating around the monsters. You will also find new obstacles like glass tiles that break when you or monsters walk over them, rocks that are in your way and can get pushed around and buttopns that need to be pressed if you want to open the exit. These puzzles get progressively harder as new elements get introduced and can be quite difficult especially because the game has no "undo" button. Each turn you do cannot be taken back and there is no way to reset a room unless you die. Dying is also very painful because you only have a limited amount of lives and you have to reastart from the beginning if you lose them all. his is intended to increase the difficulty of the game although I can understand that this would frustrate some players.
The artstyle is, as you can tell from the screenshots, a simple pixel style that emulates old Game Boy titles. Some of the sprites, especially during cutscenes, can be more detailed but otherwise it will use this old school art style. I like that you can switch between different color palettes if you get sick from the same grey color palette.
It's an overall fun puzzle game although brutaly difficult, especially towards the end. If you like these kind of puzzle games, pick it up, you won't regret it.

Now for the second half of the reveiw. This is the last warning that this will contain spoilers.
Disregard everything I said above. I lied about the game. This isn't a puzzle game. 255 levels to complete? You wish there were onyl 255 layers. This game has layers upon layers, both figuratively and literally. There are secrets stages that you can find which not only give you more content but also shortcuts tools and even more secrets to get further down a path that will make you regret that you ever picked up this game. This is an eldritch abomination disguised as a game and it WILL break you if you go down that path but at the same time you can push back and try to break the game.
The game is full of holes and secrets but it does it's best to hide it from you. The actual game is solving the mystery surrounding it, the puzzle game is just here to occupy your mind and keep you away from finding the secrets. But if you are willing to look further into it, you can find all kind of hints that steer you into the right direction and you will find new secrets to solve. These 255 puzzles that you always solve will lose their meaning because you find the tools to skip most of them but at that point you are in so dee that there is no return anymore.
I tried to warn you, don't lose your mind now and always remember, you are not playing this game, it is playing you.

Cryptark is one of the harder roguelikes I have played but also one of the most satisfying. It is one of those games that will use your own greed against you and the only reason you failed is because you got too greedy.
In Cryptark you are part of a crew of salvagers that are contracted by a shady organization to find and salvage an ancient alien spaceship only known as the "Cryptark". To find the target you first has to salvage some other alien vessels to find the right coordinates. These alien starships have been abandoned a long time ago and the alien race is extinct but their advanced automated systems are still active and very hostile to any intruder.
You pilot a mech suit called the "Gunhead" which can carry up to four weapons at the same time and is your only protection in this hostile environment. The goal is clear, find the central cortex AI core and destroy it, this is the only way to shut down all activities inside the ship so your crew can salvage it. How you do that is up to you

The gameplay is a mix of management, tactics and fast-paced twin-stick shooter action. You travel in a zero G environment which means you can fly in any direction you want inside the ship. Each ship is full of hazards, enemies, turrets and subsystems. Enemies will hunt you down if they notice you and turrets activate if you come to close. Combat noise alerts other drones even if they cannot see you. This gives the player a unique way to approach combat, be loud and messy which might attract too much attention but trying to be stealthy could cost you time. And time is of essence here because your contractors will rate very ship you salvage and if you take too long they will deduct money from your salary. I will later explain, why money is important, let's focus for now more on combat

You can freely use any of your four weapons. There is a wide variety of weapons but most have limited ammo. Exceptions are melee and energy weapons as well as shields (which can take the spot of a weapon). If your run out of ammo, you can try to find an ammo supply box inside the spaceships, this will cost you money however. Your mech suit also has limited health that can be protected with a shield but if you fall too low you could either use a repair kit (if you brought one with you) or find repair stations inside the ship which also cost money to use.
There are numerous different enemies in the game which all have different abilities and weapons. The basic drones will just try to ram you with a spike, bigger drones will fire shots at you and some might even have shields. Turrets are harder to spot because they are hidden inside walls and only reveal themselves if you come closer but you can destroy them before they fully activate.
One important aspect of the game are the subsystems. These control the various ship functionalities and destroying them cam make your job easier. A door system controls locked doors, so if you destroy it you can pass through any door without having to find keys. A sentry system controls the turret inside the ship, so if you remove it it will shut down all remaining turrets. But each ship system has their own form of protection. A sentry system is a giant laser and it can only be harmed when it charges it attack, so you have to fire and then dodge.
The player has to strategize which systems he wants to take on or if he wants to go straight for the core. The core itself is often protected by other systems like a shield system or an alarm system. Taking out those first is necessary.

Reducing the number of systems inside the ship helps you in the long run but costs you more of that precious time. Rushing is a valid strategy but exploring is also valuable. Scattered through the ship are tech licenses, you can collect these to get access to new weapons and items for your run. Rushing through the game might be faster but you will loose out on the firepower that you need for later starships.

Between missions you can change your loadout. New equipment can be put inside your weapon slots and consumables can be taken with you. But everything you buy costs money and f you want to take more ammo with you it will cost you even more money. Depending on how well you do on your jobs you can be more generous but sometimes you want to save up so you can buy more expensive stuff later.
If you die during an exploration, you won't lose your run but you will have to pay the fee for repairing your mech suit and you won't get the money back from bought weapons. It's up to the player to decide how greedy they get with their arsenal or how safe they want to play it. Oversepnding could lose you the run but not investing in solid equipment might kill you and cost you even more.

To give the players more reasons to take risks, each mission will have bonus objectives. these can either be that you take down specific subsystems inside the ship or that you leave them intact, that you use no shields or take less health with you. These pay extra money but can make the mission harder. If you are doing badly, you will have to take some of these on to make up for the lost money.
During the game you also get extra challenges for artifacts. These often take some ridiculous requirements but give you an artifact if you finish them. Artifacts are the only form of metaprogression in Cryptark. They unlock some of the lore of the dead alien civilization and for every two artifacts you find you can buy a new mech suit that you can use in future runs. These mech suits start with different loadouts and have various passive abilities, they can change how you play the game.

If you want amore traditional roguelike mode, there is an alternate game mode that removes the money aspect and loadouts from the game, instead you have to collect new weapons as you go through the ships and replace depleted weapons with new ones. I personally like the standard mode better because the risk vs reward system is so satisfying.


This game is absolutely fantastic and shows its quality in every aspect. The artstyle is beautiful, the soundtrack is amazing and you have fully voiced characters, that give you advice during your runs. And if you haven't noticed it, the engineer is voiced by Jerma. There is onyl one thign that annoys me and that is the fact that there is no cloud saving. I have to recollect all the artifacts and unlock the mech suits again when I reinstall the game and some of those are REALLY hard to get. But gameplay wise there is nothing negative to say.

I recently started playing this again when the 2.0 version came out which came with a bunch of new content and quality of life improvements. I think there is currently no better time to pick this up than now, the imrpovements are a huge benefit for the game and make it feel much smoother and enjoyable. Not that it was a bad game before but it feels now more... complete if that makes sense.

In Potion Craft you play as an alchemist who recently moved into an old house with a magical garden and a broken alchemy machine in the cellar. You decide to use your new home as a potion shop to sell potions to the townsfolk.
As you can guess, this game is all about potion crafting. But this game uses a unique way to create potions that you will never see in any other game and it's a really fun mechanic. Instead of adding ingredients for properties, you have a huge alchemy map that displays all the potions that you can craft. When you first start off most of the map will be unexplored and you have to move around it to find out the potion locations. You also have to brew a potion the first time to discover its effect. There are also hazard sections that will destroy the potion if you move into them and you can use whirlpools for short teleportations which can make navigating easier.
But how do you move on this map? With ingredients of course! Each ingredient has a specific direction and shape, when you add it to the cauldron you can stir it to move along the drafted path. Adding an ingredient as it is will only add half it's path to the map but you can crush it in your mortar to draw out the rest of the path. You can finetune this crushing process to the desired length, which is a nice feature. By adding multiple ingredients you will create your desired path to any of the potion outlines of the map, stir it until your potion moves to that spot. Touching the symbol is enough to craft the desired potion but if you stand in the exact spot you get a stronger effect which sells for more. To finetune your potion you don't have to get the exact path, you can add more water to the potion which will slowly slide it back to the starting position. By overshooting and putting it into a good position, you can slide it right where you need it. This is even easier done by zooming in and checking the map. If you look closely you see lines that show directly in which direction the center is and if you line the line of your potion up with the line of the potion effect, you can get precise results.
You also don't have to stop with just one effect you can move your potion around and have up to five different effects (although these effects are weaker since sronger effects count for three effects), which some customers might pay more for.
Your magical garden acts as source for your ingredients, you can pick herbs and mushrooms there and later you can buy new seeds for it. You can even expand it through a specific NPC which gives you more room for ingredients.
There are generally three types of ingredients, herbs, mushrooms and gems. Herbs and mushrooms are very similiar in design but mushrooms have often wackier paths that are harder to fit into your map. Gems on the other hand work completely different and are extremely expensive. They act as teleporters that teleport you to the end of their path instead of moving through the path, which makes them great to get around hazards. Some of the harder potions require gems or you won't get through the hazards.

Each day you will have a various amount of random customers that demand potions but often they don't say "I want a healing potion" or "I want a fire potion" and instead will give you a rough explanation of what they need. A customer might tell you for example that he wants to hunt an animal so you can give him a potion that makes him faster or a potion that puts the animal to sleep. Often it's obvious what they want but sometimes you have to guess and if you guess wrong too many times you will anger the custiomer and he will leave. If you figure out the correct potion they want, you can try to haggle with them to get more money but this can backfire and you get less money instead. Haggling is however very easy and the only reason I don't do it so often in late game is because it's repetitive.
Satisfied customers will boost your reputation which increases the amount of customers you get each day and also increases the base price of your potions. It also increases the inventory of merchants with a bigger chance of reduced prices for their wares. Merchants appear randomly among your customers each day (you never leave your potion shop) and there are merchants for herbs, mushrooms and gems. There are also merchants that sell seeds for your garden and one specific merchant sells you parts for your alchemy machine and magic paper. Magic paper can be used to write down recipes of your potions. This is a quality of life mechanic that allows you to recreate a potion without going through the entire creation process again. You start with a few magic pages to save your basic recipes but have to buy more later if you want to note down all the different effects. You can even use these recipes as base for a new potion if you want to add more effects to it and you can edit the design of the bottle for the potion which doesn't have any effect but can make it easier to identify potions in your inventory.

The alchemy machine is the end game mechanic of the game. It is used to craft very complex ingredients with the ultimate goal of creating the philosopher's stone. To create ingredients in the alchemy machien you have to feed it various potions. These new ingredients, called salts, can be used for some more advanced map movements. The void salt will erase parts of the path, which can make it easier to line up your path or remove mistakes without having to redo everything, the sun and moon salt can rotate your potion together with its path, so you can get into positions you normally wouldn't have. Even the philosopher's stone has a unique use in recipes but I won't spoil what it does.

The vusual artstyle of the game is very unqiue. The game looks like old medieval drawings thatyou would often found in books. It's certainly a bold choice for the art direction of your game. Similiar the music also sounds like old medieval music which complements the art style. A fitting choice for a medieval fantasy setting.

There are some negative aspects to the game however. The biggest issue is repetitiveness. There is no way to sugar coat it, the gameplay loop will get at some point repetitive. You will do the same tasks over and over, the most fun aspect of the game is exploring the map but once you know all the recipes you will just repeat the same steps, sell potions until you have enough gold to reach whatever goal you want to.
Another issues is how merchants appear. Because they come to you instead the other way around, you don't know which merchant will appear when. This could put you into a tough spot because you are missing key ingredients or you use all your gold on one merchant just for another more important merchant to appear later on the same day.
I wish there was more control on when which merchant appears or what stock the merchant offers. Sometimes they don't have the ingredients that you need, which is annoying.
Once you get a massive amount of different potions you also have trouble finding what you need because unlike for ingredients there are not filters for potions.

These are the only issues that I have with the game but I still enjoy playing it because it's such a nice chill game to relax with.

For some reason Marvel's Midnight Suns wasn't a commercial success which is baffling to me considering how good this game is.
In Midnight Suns the demoness Lilith gets resurrected by HYDRA to help them conquer earth. This alarms the Avengers who seek help from the Midnight Suns, a superhero team that deals with supernatural theats. The Midnight Suns resurrect the Hunter, the child of Lilith who killed their mother centuries ago. The Hunter is an original character in this game that the player creates int he beginning of the game. It's cool that we can create our own superhero in this game even if the options are somewhat limited.

This game was by Firaxis, the same studio that did the XCOM remakes. You can see the influence of their previous work here, there a re many parallels between XCOM and Midnight Suns. The main gameplay is the tactical combat which uses cards to play attacks and abilites. Each fight is inside a circular arena and every character has their own cards that get shuffled into the deck at the beginning of combat. There are three card types, attacks, skills and heroic cards. Attacks usually deal damage or knock enemies back, skills have helpful effects like extra card draws or defenses and heroic cards are signature abilities from heroes that require a special resource called "heroism" to be played. Heroism is built up by playing other cards and can also be used for environmental attacks like kicking a heavy object into an enemy. You can also use your cards to knock enemies into deadly hazards or into each other for extra damage. Using both your cards and the environment to your advantage makes the combat extremely fun.
The heroes gain experience by using cards and will often level up in the middle of combat. Level ups will give them more HP and attack power but does not affect secondary stats like block gain. Overall, the level of characters isn't too important because enemies usually scale to your level anyway, so I think that's wasted potential.
More important are the rewards from combat. You get new booster packs with new cards and what I like here is that you will always get cards from the heroes you used during that combat. This allows you to focus on heroes you like to play with and enhance their abilities.
If you have duplictae cards, you can fuse them together to get an upgraded version of the card that enhances it's abilities and sometimes adds new ones. There also is a rare chance to get modified cards from packs wihch has an additional effect that teh card normally wouldn't have. It's fun to experiment with different cards and strategies around and tinkering with differing possibilites. You can also try to find out, what heroes work best together.
Between battles you return to your base which you can upgrade through the game. This unlocks new mechanics and ways to improve your heroes, craft consumable items for combat and do some Persona-like social activities with the heroes. Each hero in the game can be talked to and you can hang out with them for some friendship points. Higher friendships unlock and improve passive abilities of that hero.
What surprised me is how big the base map is. You can explore the entire region around your base and collect materials for crafting but also find some secrets that will help you further into the game. There are also these arcane chests which usally contain some cosmetic items which you can buy with a currency that you get after missions.
Speaking of s´cosmetics, the game has a ton of them and most of them can be earned through gameplay. These are usually palette swaps for characters (no new costumes) but the Hunter gets some extra costumes and face props that you can equip to customize them more to your liking.
And while I'm mentioning the Hunter, they have a special mechanic about balancing Light and Darkness. You can either focus on a Light path that is more about healing and support magic or a dark path, that is more about harming enemies (or find a middleground between the two). Playing cards of an affinity increases that affinity further and several dialog options will also push you into the desired direction. Besides that, there does not seem to be any sort of story changes except that your dialog options will make you sound more like a jerk or like a nice person depending on what path you choose.
Also I really don't like the voice acting of the Hunter. All the other voice actors are really great and you have some memorable ones like Yuri Lowenthal for Spider-Man who also voiced him in the recent Spider-man games. The Hunter however sounds really stiff (at least in the female voice that I use, I cannot comment on the male voice) and awkward, which maybe was intentional considering tha they come from another century and feels out of place.

The cast of Marvel superheroes is massive, you have Members of the Avengers like Iron man and Captain America, members of the Defenders like Doctor Strange, even some of the X-Men like Magik and Wolverine. There is most likeley a hero in here that you like or even is your favourite. Each hero has their own playstyle and gimmick, Doctor Strange for example is a flexible caster with many supportive spells that can suddenly deal massive damage if he needs to, Wolverine is an unkillable berserker that tears through enemies with his claws and has an absurd amount of healing capabilities and Spider-man is a menace on the battlefield that uses the environment to his advantage.
I love how the playstyle fits the characters so perfectly, they really captured the essecne of the heroes.

The price might seem very high but trust me, there is a lot of value in this game, especially if you are into Marvel comics but even if you just like tactical combat in general, this game is great (although you will miss out on many of the references).

Moon is full of cheese. Rat wants cheese. Rat takes rocket to moon to get cheese.
This is basically the premise of Rocket Rats, a silly little bullet heaven game about rats that raid the moon for cheese. The game does not offer a lot of content, I played for around 3 hours and I saw most of the game. But the game is incredibly fun and for the low price it's acceptable.
The gameplay is simple, you have to fight through 30 waves of enemies and collect as much cheese as you can get. Killing enemies gives you cheese and every time you get enough cheese, you can select a new upgrade for your rat. What this game makes different however is that you only get one upgrade per wave, so you have to think carefully what you take. The upgrades can be further upgraded up to seven times and the last few upgrades are really powerful, so it's better to invest in specific upgrades instead of relying on everything at once.
You also have a low chance to get rare upgrades which don't have their own upgrades but are so powerful, they don't need it. Some upgrades, once maxed, will also offer you a duo upgrade, like arrows and poison creating poisoned arrows or stars casting lightning on enemies if you have both.
What really makes this game different to other bullet heaven game are the skill trees. Each character has their own unique skill tree and these skill trees even have their own different playstyles. The Doctor Rat for example can either opt into a poison playstyle or a curse playstyle depending on how you spec into the skill tree.
These upgrade trees persist between runs and make the characters much more unique than other titles in the genre.

That being said, the game leans on the easier side, there are no difficulty settings and once you have unlocked a few skills for your characters you can easily beat the game. This is even more emphasized through the lack of content. There is only one very small map which changes visuallys depending on the character you play but still the same map. There are only three enemy types, stars that move fast but have low health, planets that have very high health but are slow and moons that are inbetween.
While there is a good amount of upgrades, it still feels very similiar for your runs and the main difference comes from the character skill tree, not the run upgrades.

It isn't a bad game, it's super fum, it just offers very little content. You have to decide for yourself if you want to pick this up, especially if you have other games like Brotato or Vampire Survivors that offer more content for the same price.
Also, as a final feedback, the game has very poor optimization, once you get past wave 25, you start to notice frame drops and lag and this gets worse once you reach endless.

An incredibly unique deckbuilder with mechanics that I've never seen like that before. In Pyrene a village was attacked and destroyed by monsters, all the villagers fled and only the player character and her mother are left.
You initially search for the other villagers and later try to find and kill the one responsible for releasing all those monsters.
This is a very story driven game as you will notice but it's still a roguelike, so you can expect the usual randomness and broken builds.
What defines this game is how mechanically different it is to other deckbuilders. You don't play your cards like you are used to, instead they are mixed with a "danger deck" and layed out on a board. You can move your character aroudn to interact with these cards, enemies will fight you, resources will be collected and items will be picked up and used. What is worth noting here, cards from your deck are not shuffled, you pick the order of the cards and this gives you an advantage for your build. Your cards are still mixed with the enemy deck and you don't know hwen they appear but this way you can predict what the next card from your deck will be and what you can do with it, making it possible to plan your next turns ahead.
Spaced on the board that were cleared are blocked for movement, which means you also have to think about the route you take, maximizing to collect all items without suffering too much damage.

At any point you want you can camp at your current spot which draws new cards from the deck to fill blank spaces but also increases the HP of all monsters currently in play. This means that players want to clear as much as possible before camping so they don't make monsters too strong. Camping also costs provisions which are limited and once they run out you will lose HP for camping. This cost increases each time which further pushes you in the direction to optimize your looting route.
Once the enemy deck runs out, an altar appears. And this is my favourite part of the game. The game features a "risk vs reward" system that works perfectly. Once the altar appears, enemies don't drop their usual loot anymore and will instead drop shards which charge up the altar. These charges increase the rarity of the rewards you get after completing it, making it worthwile to farm more monsters but taking the risk of dying. Altars will give you a chest with either a new card or a passive relic that is active for the entire run. The game also features a weighting system and openly tells you about it, something that other roguelikes should also do. basically, if you have specific mechanics in your deck like healing, dealing damage or status effects, the game will try to give you items that have similiar effects or work well together with it. The chance for this happening is increased by the luck stat which you can increase during your run.
I absolutely love this system, it makes it more likely to get great synergies for your build instead of getting a collection of useless trash that does not work well together.

The game features a distinct array of characters with very unique playstyles. The first character, the huntress, makes use of all the basic game mechanics, she has a few damage dealing cards, some supplies and healing items and that's it. She also has an ability that shoots everyone in the same column or row as her on the board. She is rather plain to play as but quite effective at clearing the board.
The next character you unlock will be the priest and he has a rather unique playstyle. He has an assistant character that helps him and you can switch between those two characters to clear the board and collect items in two spots, improving your clearing performance.

All the charatcers in this game has their own unique gimmick like that which makes them completly distinct from each other instead of being just another variant of the same guy.

In terms of builds, this game has some completely busted mechanics that you can abuse and I mean this in a positive way. I had one build in which enemies would get poisoned whenever I moved, which meand that I could get them killed by just walking around. Another build I would kill everyone whenever I camped.
Stuff like this makes the game look easy but it's actually quite challenging, which makes these overpowered builds especially fun if you can pull them off.

I also like the fact that there are 12 different biomes and each biome has their own enemies, items and special gimmick that you have to be aware of. There is quite the amount of variety thanks to that since a run will take you only through four different biomes.


There is one thing that bothered me however and that is the way the game progression works. When you first start out you only have one character and the game expects you to win your runs if you want to progress through the game. Each time you win, you unlock a new biome, a new character or something else and that's the main way o progress through the game. What's worse, the game will force you to play specific characters to progress further. When you unlock the second character, you have to play with it for your next run if you want to unlock the third. You can still switch to the first but that way you will only only play for fun not for progress through the story and the game elements. This is frustrating and goes against the usual roguelike mechanics.
It makes sense because the devs try to tell a story with their game and it's actually a good story that isn't just an afterthought but forcing the player to play in the intended way feels wrong.

But I have to admit, this won't stop me from coming back to this game, it's so much fun to play and I'm eager to unlock all the characters and cards.

Biogun is a fun Metroidvania with Twin-Stick-Shooter mechanics. You play as an experimental vaccine that is tasked with destroying a virus inside a dog. The story is a little bit silly and over the top at times but overall fun.
The game takes clearly inspiration from Hollow Knight in all the good ways. Your character has an energy bar that you can use to heal yourself. You also can find various subweapons that need energy to fire. Hitting enemies with your main weapon refills your energy. This system forces players to decide if they want to invest all their energy into killing enemies faster but with the downside of not having enough to heal yourself anymore or save some energy for en emergency heal. I like this concept because the player has to evaluate what he needs more.
There are four subweapons which are all designed after typical shooter guns. You start with a fast firing machine gun and find later a sniper rifle, a shotgun and a grenade launcher, all which have not only combat uses but are also used in some way in the environment.
Besides your subweapons you can also find gun mods for your main weapon. These effectively also coutn as different weapons and all have their own usefulness. Some mods can have longer range but with lower damage, another mod might deal no damage at all but refills your energy very quickly. I liked that there are so many different types of weapons in the game.
You can also find different chips which act as passive upgrades. You can only equip one at a time but they have very powerful effects like a combat drone that follows you or an extra life that you can refill at save stations.

The game features a wide variety of biomes which are all themed after organs inside the dog. Each biome also has some sort of gimmick or special hazards. The lungs are dark and you have to activate temporary lights to see the environment, the liver is full of toxic liquid that you have to navigate around and so on. Because each biome has it's own gimmick you always feel like you discover something new and it doesn't get boring.

Of course no metroidvania would be complete without a ton of bosses and powerups. And Biogun has no shortage of bosses that impress. There are only a few bosses that I didn't like (mainly the eye boss that just constantly jumps around without doing anything else), all the other bosses are great. There has been put a lot of care into the bosses to make them challenging but fun to fight against. They have clear telegraphed attacks and once you learn their patterns they are easy to beat. And if you struggle, you can always cheese them with the strongest equipment combination.
In terms of powerups, you can find new abilities from bosses (including the subweapons) and different collectibles. Synapses for example are used to reveal the map and it's secrets while atoms increase your health or energy (depending on what you choose). There are also consumable items and cosmetics that you can find. The game makes sure that there is something to find in every corner and if it is just some extra money.
The visuals of the game are also great to look at. The game uses a cartoon style that fits the silly narrative. It's an artstyle similiar to Hollow Knight but way more colorful and cheerful despite the dark untertone of a rampaging virus. But don't get me wrong, the game does have it's darker moments, once you enter the viral zones you realize how dangerous the virus can be.
And the music is absolutely briliant. The game uses a leitmotif that you can hear in many of it's songs and any game soundtrack that uses a leitmotif is already a hundred times better. Even the playable character dances to the beat of the music when he showers inside a save station.

But there are some sour points in an otherwise amazing game. The first thing is, the game is buggy. Oh god, is the game buggy. I rarely encounter so many bugs while playing a game. Most of these bugs are not so bad, just some visual bugs like a stuck boss bar after defeating a boss but some can be very annoying like the constant bug that I cannot scroll inside the quest menu. there was only one gamebreaking bug that was resolved after reloading my game. I entered a new area and my screen was stuck at being black.
I contribute most of these bugs because of the engine the devs used. They used something called "construct engine" which is actually an engine for browser] games. They even warn you when you start the game that you should close your browser because it might trigger some issues. It's clearly not an engine meant to design such a complicated game which makes it even more impressive that they achieved such a masterpiece.
One other thing that bothered me is a mandatory stealth section. I will never understand the obsession of game developers to put a stealth section inside a game that is not meant to be a stealth game. It ruins the gameplay pacing. In this case you have to travel through a vent section while avoiding alarm lasers. Touching any of the lasers will throw you back at the beginning of the entire section which is frustrating. I wish the devs would just cut this section out or change it to something much more bearable.

Besides all of that, you should get this game if you enjoyed Hollow Knight. It takes many notes from it but puts its own spin on it.

Hands down the best deckbuilder of 2024. I have already 10 hours into the game and I can see myself sinking more hours into it.
The game has a very peculiar gameplay mechanic that sets it aside from the other games in the genre: cheating. In Diceomancer you have a special magical artifact called "The One Dice" (yes, I know dice is the plural, just roll with it). This magic relic allows you to manipulate the fabric of reality. in practise this means that you can simply reroll any number in the game.
This starts out simple by rerolling enemy HP or damage for your cards but as you learn the ropes of the game and get a better understanding what actually counts as a number in this game you realize how absolutely broken this artifact is. Reroll HP, your own hand, your money, your mana, shop prices battle rewards and so much more.
So what is the drawback, surely such a powerful artifact must have some punishment, right? Yes and no. There is practically no downside on using the dice at least not immediately. You can use the dice as much as you want. You have technically limited charges for your dice but you can simply reroll this too.
But there is a thing called the purple mist. This mist is the result of the fabric of reality unraveling due to your manipulation. As gameplay mechnaic this means you have to travel faster than the purple mist or bad things happen to you. You can compare this to FTLs rebel fleet mechanic because it's essentially the same. The player can travel on the map back and dorth liek he wants but the purple mist always gets closer. Using your dice on cards will permanently change them but also make them "distorted". Playing these distorted cards speeds up the purple mist. This means the player cannot change evry card in his deck to something op and has to decide carefully which cards he wants to manipulate with his dice.
There are other good design decisions that make the dice not a complete game winner. Enemies have multiple HP bars and you can only manipulate one per dice charge.

One thing that makes this really fun however is the mana mechanic. Too many deckbuilders try to copy Slay the Spires energy mechanic and don't try to innovate something new. Diceomancer has instead a mana mechanic, you get three colorless mana each turn and you can discard cards in your hand to change the color of the mana to the one of the card. Cards have various mana requirements, some can have colorless mana, some have coloroed mana and some have a mix of multiple colors. Mana is not lost at the end of the round but you have a limit on how much mana you can hold, which gives the game a unique resource management mechanic that's closer to Magic the Gathering than it is to Slay the Spire.
The same color system is also used for your character class. Your character starts with three different colors on each run and depending on what colors you pick you get a different starting class with their own card pool, relics and special abilities.

The game is incredibly fun to play even without using the dice mechanic you can just enjoy the deckbuilding and mana mechanics but the dice adds so much more value to an already good game and turns the experience in one of the best I ever had.

There are only a handful of issuesI have. The first one is, the text on some cards is incredibly small to read. This is mainly an issue oon cards with lots of texts. The second is that the meta progression is a little bit weird. After your runs you get upgrade points that you can invest into an upgrade tree. This unlocks new cards, relics and even new mechanics. It's the main way of progression but it kinda feels out of place. Maybe that's just me.

Have you ever had a game that you are really terrible at but still love? That game is Spellmasons for me.
In Spellmasons you play as a wizard but not any ordinany wizard, you are a true wizardry connoisseur that appreciates the fine art of spellcasting.
In it's core essence Spellmasons is a turnbased tactical rogue-like in which you have to survive through multiple levels and kill every enemy. You do this by casting spells on enemies or yourself or even objects.
Each stage you decide where you want to start from and after that you can go and unleash your spells. The game has a very cool combo system for spells. Each spell can be cast as a simple spell like shooting an arrow or poisoning an enemy. But you can queue up multiple spells together and create powerful combos. Even the most mundane spells can become awesome this way.
Here is an example of a spell that you could create: You queue up bloat, push, slash, three very simple spells. Bloat curses a unit to explode on death, push pushes the unit away from you and slash simply deals damage to the unit. Congratulations, you have now turned an enemy into a bomb that you launch at enemies.
Another example? Target circle, bolt, resurrect. Target Circle will target every unit in a circle, bolt is a chain lightning spell that jumps between multiple nearby units and resurrect will revive dead units under your control. The result is that you create multiple chain lightnings (one for each unit in the circle) that jump between the units inside the circle, hitting them multiple times and killing them and directly after you revive them to fight for you.

There are even more ways to deal with enemies like pushing them into water or lava, creating clones of yourself that you use as decoys and much much more. The only limit is your creativity. And mana of course which brings me to stats.
Your wizard starts very feeble, small health pool, very small movement and cast range and a limited mana pool for casting. After each level you get some statr points that you can spend to increase any stats you want. You can turn your wizard into a beefy tank that will simply outlast enemies as he curses them with a slow and painful death. Or you can turn your wizard into a long range sniper that stays away from the enemy attack range.
To cpmplement your playstyle you can also spend your points to buy and level up some runes. These are randomized each level and can have all kinds of effects like all your attacks will inflict poison or that some spell types are chaper to cast. Some runes provide bounties on enemies which will create effects for you when killed like spawning poitons or reviving the killed enemy under your control.
It is necessary to find a good balance between stat increases and runes because both require the same stat points to be purchased.

All these mechanics fit perfectly together and allow you to play as the wizard of your dreams. But the game is hard, brutaly even so. In the first level you will usually encounter two or three enemies and these are pushovers that you can easily deal with. This will lull you into a fake sense of security that the game might be too easy. Oh boy you could be not more wrong. The scaling is abysmal, each level the number of enemies increases, new and stronger enemy types will spawn. What, you thought you would be just fighting slow walking golems and archers that shoot you with toothpicks forever? There are slimes that shoot over obstacles, priests that resurrect dead units, living boulders that can shoot you no matter where you are and vampires not to be confused with mana vampires which, yes, are a thing in this game.
And don't forget champions which are a beefed up version of regular enemies with increased stats and some nasty special abilities. Good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck!

But hard difficulty breeds creativity. It pushes you to the limit, you thought you had a good build but then got destroyed, so now you are back to the drawing board, coming up with an even better build than before. I really love the game makes it clear that you won't get far with just some basic spells, you need to discover broken combos, bring the game to it's knees and show it who is a true wizard master!

I'm absolutely baffled to how little attention this game gets. This game has some of the best synergies in gameplay I have ever seen in a rogue-like.
The world of Dicefolk is filled with "Chimeras", monsters with all kinds of weird designs and abilities. These creatures suddenly went hostile when an evil god named Salem took control of them. You play as Alea, a young hero who takes ont he task to defeat Salem. You are equipped with a talisman that lets you take control of chimeras.

The gameplay is a mix of rogue-like, deckbuilder and monster tamer. You play through three zones and each zone has multiple nodes for you to discover. Most nodes are hidden when you enter a zone and you have to defeat enemies to reveal more of the map. You start with three dummy creatures which are strong enough to defeat early enemies but what you really want are chimeras.
These can be found in statues, there are three in each zone and you can pick one chimera from these three statues (like picking a starter in pokemon). These chimeras always have a special ability. These abilities are activated under specific conditions, when the creature attacks, when it gets attacked or if another ally takes damage and so on. You usally look for abilities that complement each other for your strategy. For an example, there is a creature that attacks back if it got attacked and another that attacks when one of your creatures attacks.This way you can always attack back when your chimera gets hit.

Combat in this game works a bit different to other creature battlers. Instead of having a bunch of abilities for your creatures, you use dice here. You start with three dice and can get more later. Each side of a die has various symbols that define what you can do. Swords let you attack, shields block one attack, crossed swords let you and the enemy attack each other and many more. A key gameplay mechanic is also rotation. You always fight with a team of three chimeras and enemies also have up to three creatures. But only the monster in the front can normally attack and take damage, so you can rotate creatures around with your dice to change who can attack or who takes damage. This way you can split damage between your creatures while maxing out damage on enemies.
The enemy team also uses dice but you can decide the order in which what die is used. This gives players great control what they want tdo despite the random element od dice rolling. I think this is a great way to combine RNG with tactical decisions.

Damage on your creatures is kept between battles but there are often ways to heal inside and outside in battle.
One aspect for healing is equipment. Each chimera has slots for items just like in Pokemon but the number of item slots can be increased on special nodes like the campfire. A chimera can have up to five items. These items can provide healing more attack power or even provide completely new abilities. Equipment is the key to refining your build, they pair greatly with the individual abilities of your chimeras.

As you progress through the zones you will also find the dice merchant. Thi sguy offers new dice but also improves yur existing dice by swapping out sides with new ones. This way you can increase the chances to roll what you need and is another great way to control the RNg of this game.

As you progress through the game you will unlock new talismans. These act as "creature" decks. Each talisman has their own pool of chimeras that they can pull from when they offer you one at statues. These are often themed around specific gameplay mechanics like being aggressive with attacks and attack power or playing more mobile with many rotations for your team to activate abilities. A great way to try out different strategies and playstyles.
Once you beat the game with all four base talismans you unlock the door to the final boss, Salem.
By playing with the various talismans you will also unlock more chimeras, new equipment and even new gameplay mechanics. There are so many cool combinations and strategies that you can try out.
And beating the game unlocks trial mode, which works similiar to ascensions in other rogue-likes. They increase the diffciulty by adding more challenging rules to the game but unlike other games you also get a possitive rule change like getting free rerolls. It's interesting to see a difficulty system that does not just increase the difficulty further but makes things interesting by giving you something in return too.
The last patch also intriduced a new challenge mode that lets you play a run with very specific rules, starting equipment and creatures. Beating these challenge runs unlocks new items for you to try out.

There is a lot to discover and I really love how all the mechanics fit perfectly together to support your strategies. It's like a neat little puzzle box that you try to solve.