Recent reviews by John Battman

If you're just wondering about the "Mostly playable" controller support - it's excellent. "Mostly Playable" is a disservice to the game - a few screens use RS to move a mouse cursor, but those screens would have been HARDER to navigate with conventional snap-to controller navigation.

REVIEW STARTS HERE: The ratings speak for themselves - 96% of people probably aren't wrong. The game's great. Reminiscent of old school asteroid-style games with the tank controls, but with tons of different ways to build, weapons to use, enemies to fight, "modifiers" which basically act as custom difficulty increases (and a couple that just change how things play without necessarily making the game harder), so it's accessible at its base difficulty but gets pretty challenging on higher difficulty, especially if you choose to go endless, but well before that part of the run.

Runs are a good duration, too - 120 waves but the waves are like ~20 seconds, sometimes less, excluding boss waves which are obviously longer, but it takes maybe 30-40 minutes to get through which may sound a bit short but you also upgrade ~30 times during that period so there's plenty of decision-making to enjoy.

The upgrades are all meaningful as well - very few, if any, upgrades left me feeling exactly the same as before taking it. There are some that are less noticeable immediately, like increased shield or hull regen, but for the most part you either see or feel the difference immediately or in short order which is how upgrades SHOULD work, imo.

All in all, excellent game. My only complaint is that sometimes visual clarity goes to hell (probably half my deaths are because I can't see where the hell I am anymore) and the screen wrap, for some reason, breaks my brain if I'm going diagonal / crossing 2 screen transitions at once, but that's probably a me problem. As for the visual clarity, it's gonna happen when you have a lot of visually impressive effects on screen simultaneously, but this game LOVES pink and it really would have benefitted from using a broader color pallette specifically for projectiles. Enemies come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, but projectiles are *mostly* pink, including your own, and many if not most of your ship body options, so it's like ... bruh ... where tf am I???

Other than that though, great game.

I don't even like incremental games (but I do like trains) and I spent two and a half hours playing this the first time I tried it. I only stopped because of hunger pangs. Most incremental games feel like they're a step away from an idle game - really not much thought, just do something trivial (or wait) to generate resources, spend resources to get more resources, repeat. Not this game!

What makes it unique, in my opinion, is that the developer managed to make both a fun "active" portion of the game where you get to experience the results of your choices in a way other than "number go up" - maybe you leaned heavily into shotguns, and now you have some explosive shotgun shrapnel monstrosity careening through the neighborhood obliterating large swaths of land in bursts. Maybe you decided to go more grenade-heavy, lobbing huge zones of destruction at your enemies (dastardly nemeses like trees, rocks, and cacti)!

I don't wanna spoil anything but the tech tree has a lot of surprises - quirky, unique techs that you wouldn't expect (at least, I didn't), entire new progression systems as you advance into the game, upgrades for specific tech branches aren't generic - they're thematically relevant and again make the game FEEL even better once you have them (like weapon upgrades aren't just +1 damage, +1 attack speed, etc. like in many incrementals - shotgun stuff mostly focuses on extra pellets and piercing, minigun on larger mag and reload speed, etc.) so it's rewarding to unlock them and gives that "just one more run!" feeling.

I'm honestly super impressed. This is incredible value for the price. I suspect that it might take me 5-8 hours to beat the core game, assuming there's no prestige system, but I can easily see myself playing this at least a couple more times from start to finish just to try and specialize in new weapons, maybe do some weird fringe builds if I can think of anything, and I also think that this is the kind of game that you can easily pick up 6 months later or however long after you feel like you're done with it and still have some nostalgic fun because of the charm - it almost feels like a cozy game but without being all about making friends and serving coffee or w/e lol.

Anyways if you're still reading this (if anyone actually gets to this point, leave a comment saying hi - I'd be shocked to see any), buy the game! It's like $7CAD, probably $5USD, you'll get many hours of fun out of it, and it's a really well designed, neat little game. I'd argue that the dev deserves the support for not only putting out something fun and charming at a very good price, but also for his creativity and hard work designing something different!

Hell yeah, this game is great! I'll come back to write a better review once I'm running on more than 2h of sleep.

TL;DR: Imagine if Stickdeath.com never left, and never apologized for being its ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up self. You'd get something like Stick it to the Stickman, and boy that feels good in 2025.

I suck at reviewing games, but here's what I'll say - the mechanics are surprisingly fun, but the humor is really what makes this game stand out. I would have paid twice the price for the experience, and I'm broke. I'm only an hour in, but I've had a blast so far and I've seen a bit more through YT videos - it doesn't slow down - this game is honestly a fantastic time, and you're guaranteed to get your money's worth in cool stick-fighting animation moments / sequences & hilarious dark humor.

Too sick to write a proper review, but the game is incredible, and a complete steal for the price. Buy it, you won't regret it. Tons of content, variety, and fun to be had.

Really solid roguelike deck builder with nice visuals and a wide variety of spells and mechanics. They don't reinvent the wheel as far as map-traversal and relic+spells/abilities go (though you can get rituals which are a unique and interesting mechanic), but they do differ in the deck building in that you're building a loadout of spells, not cards. Each spell has 2 potential upgrades (A/B style) so you'll often find stuff that you can at least work with.

I don't usually love dice-based games but this one has a lot of ways to mitigate the RNG (which makes it comparable to the unpredictability of a card draw) by manipulating your dice, as long as you pack some utility spells.

Characters all feel quite different with different mechanics and general archetypes that their spells play into.

Honestly a really solid game. Not sure why it's only around 85% positive. The only thing that isn't great, in my opinion, is the map traversal is ... not that great. It's often obvious what the single best path is, and the paths don't branch much so you're basically committed to your path or like ... 1, MAYBE 2 if you're lucky other paths which probably just suck. The map design could really use some work.

Outside of that though? Game's a gem, in my opinion.

Great game. Well balanced. Some RNG to it, but largely mitigated by knowing the game & good decision-making (the skill portion). Battles are fun to watch. Big variety of unit choices, each with a bunch of tech/loadout options. Not much else to say. Definitely worth the price.

Were you interested in The Bazaar but driven away by their terrible monetization and treatment of their community?

Well, this game is basically The Bazaar but better, though with a simpler art style and an inventory management component. It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great. I can't stop playing it.

Some things could be clearer, and there are minor inconsistencies in the mechanics (though nothing game-breaking), so it's not a perfect 10/10, but it's pretty close. Basically engine building meets RPG.

Update: I've given The Bazaar a fair shot, and there's certainly fun to be had, but everyone who plays it agrees it's super unbalanced and there's no clear way to fix it, so... This game still wins out bigtime.

This game is a hidden gem. I've only played a few hours so far, but it feels like a cross between Spelunky 2 & Dead Cells with more emphasis on environmental interactions (using the environment creatively).

The movement feels good, and there are a lot of mobility options (dash & blink spells, double/triple/etc. jumps through runes, wall jumping, grappling hook, possible more I haven't come across) which is always important in an action-platformer.

The combat is pretty simple, but also pretty fun - there's a good variety of enemies that are well differentiated in their unique mechanics / abilities and how you'll want to approach them depending on what items / skills you have. There's also fun creative stuff like being able to stun an enemy and use it as a projectile against its buddies which is both always a laugh and surprisingly effective.

Funny little combat anecdote - I goomba-stomped an enemy (jumped on its head) to stun it, then picked it up and threw it into a bouncing glaive-type thing I'd thrown in that room, trick-shot style. That felt great.

Other fun ways to use throwing enemies:
-Threw one into a laser trap to "disarm" the trap and evaporate the enemy
-Threw one into a lantern hanging from the ceiling to do a load of damage to it and set it on fire
-Knocked the head off a skeleton and killed its body by chucking its own head at it

There are (I think) 7 biomes - I've only seen 4, but each felt well-designed with thematically-appropriate monsters and hazards (some types of traps you'll find in multiple biomes, but a crossbow in a wall is a pretty neutral theme lol). There are different level "types" in each biome, though the archetype seems to be the same for each. What I've seen so far - rising lava, descending poison gas, a horizontal equivalent which I can't remember too well because I outran it so hard I never saw it, and windy levels. I'd say maybe 1/3-ish levels has one of these gimmicks. To be honest, I love exploring the levels and taking my time so I don't particularly like the ones that force you to go fast, but it's not a huge deal and actually makes stuff like stealth potions and the cloaking ability useful.

Finally, there seems to be *a lot* of stuff to unlock. Maybe not Dead Cells level of unlocks (but I'm thinking with all 8 DLCs which is a ludicrous amount of content and coming from one of the most popular games of the genre of all time) but so far I've seen about a dozen "backgrounds" (think "character class lite") and over a dozen weapons on top of the stuff that's unlocked by default, but I'm only ~2.5 hours into the game so I suspect there's going to be at least a few dozen more items and skills to unlock, giving a whole lot of variety and ways to get through the levels.

Over all, I'd give this a solid 8/10. THe gameplay and design is really good, but there are a few things that aren't great - both damage dealt and damage taken numbers are the same color, sometimes leading you to wonder what exactly just happened if you're swinging at 2-3 enemies and took damage at the same time.

Sometimes tooltips aren't that great - Like potions tell you how long they last, but aside from their name not what they actually DO (defense potion - okay, is it flat mitigation? % based? How much? No idea).

Accessibility options are sorely lacking. Unless I missed them, there are no options for screenshake (and it shakes aggressively if you dodge-roll into a wall - normally I leave screenshake on in my games but this one is way too much even for me). I didn't see anything for colorblindness either, which doesn't affect me but is important to know before buying the game.

So yeah. Really fun, well worth the asking price, deserve a lot more attention IMO, just wish that there were a few QoL changes (like different color text for damage taken vs damage received, more detailed tooltips, and a way to disable screenshake or at least reduce it). 8/10, and easily 9/10, maybe even 10/10 if the above issues were addressed!

Very Neon. Very Bullet. Very Good. You go play now. GL HF.

YoU HaVe DiEd (but it was fun).