Hello everyone! I've been playing this game as a paid tester for some time now. After 5-6 hours into it, here are my honest thoughts about it:
GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay of this game is among the better I've seen. It keeps you engaged and makes you want to play more. Increasing the difficulty with the NG option adds a new layer for the more hardcore players. While only having played the demo, the number of enemies, upgrades, and weapons seem alright.
However, there is an obvious meta present with the Curved Repeater being among the best specials available. Combine that with the Shotgun or Roman Candle, and you have an unstoppable machine that can mow down even the final boss of the demo.
VISUALS:
On Medium and High settings it looks great, but when turned down to Low, everything changes. The very cool "physics based" barrier surrounding the arena gets replaced with a static circle, which makes the enemies bouncing off of it seem clumsy.
While this might seem bad at first glance, the performance bump experienced with this is more than noticeable. When testing on a lower performance device (4700U IGPU), the performance on 1080p jumps from ~15 FPS to a near stable 60FPS.
Enemy animations are exceptional, even on low settings. There is a certain smoothness in the attacks and movement that exceeds expectations relating to Indie Games.
Player attacks have nice animations, most of which are what you would come to expect from a game such as this one. While the animations do take a hit when going down to Low settings, it is not something that is detrimental to the experience.
MUSIC/SOUND:
The music is okay, if a bit underwhelming at certain points. Constantly listening to the same type of loops gets old after a few hours.
Regarding the sound effects, they are quite nice. I did not notice any sound quality issues, or anything that would make my experience while playing the game worse.
CONTROLS:
Controls are what you would expect. The game plays better with a controller, but mouse and keyboard works okay as well (tested with Xbox controller). The movement of the character is smooth, and there are no noticeble delays when trying to dash/shoot.
One complaint that I would like to raise is with the pointer for the mouse and keyboard controls. Due to the nature of the game, the techy pointer they've chosen sometimes gets lost in the chaos. The slight tint around the edges makes it a bit hard to spot when on top of enemies, especially "glitched" ones.
BUGS:
I've played this game upwards of 5 hours, and in that time, I did not encounter any major or game breaking issues. There have been a lot of small issues regarding the UI or UX parts though.
In my most recent runs, the Special Attack and Gravity Gun icons just turned white. While this didn't in any way worsen my gameplay, having two white boxes at the bottom of my screen proved to be a bit of an eyesore.
OVERALL:
It's a good game that it's worth playing at least once. The visuals and gameplay are good, and there's quite a big difficulty cap with the NG mechanic. It controls well, and has okay sound effects. While it doesn't have major bugs, there are a lot of small issues like button icons not being displayed and typos in the descriptions of items. These do not take away from the gameplay experience but do break the immersion.
There is a free demo to get a feel for the gameplay/mechanics, which I advise doing before buying.
As why you should listen to me, I make a living by testing games. For more reference check out my LinkedIn profile here: