EVERY TIME! Every time I get hyped for a game, I always end up not just disappointed, but with a super-negative experience. EVERY. SINGLE TIME.

This game takes bullet patterns from the SHMUP genre, but it doesn’t quite fit that mold due to your unique way of attacking enemies. First of all, you control two characters at once; one with the left stick and the other with the right stick. However, neither can attack on their own. Instead, a grey star constantly bounces back and forth between the two characters, and this object is what deals damage to the enemies. On paper, it sounds like it could work, but the first of many issues you’ll notice is that the star takes its sweet time traveling from one character to the other, and if an enemy just so happens to attack right before the star will hit them, you have to choose between taking the hit to damage the enemy or waiting even longer (because moving out of the way means the star’s trajectory changes to your new position). The only way to make it go faster is to push the corresponding shoulder button when the star gets near one of your characters, but you gotta keep it up or it’ll slow down again (and it’s tough to keep up with that when you’re avoiding bullet waves).

Speaking of controls, the game doesn’t make it clear that the D-pad acts as the face buttons for the first character while the actual face buttons are for the second character. This made it especially frustrating to change the resolution in the options menu (it was wrong when I first booted the game, and didn’t fix itself on a second boot), but it also affects the main game since it tells you to push up on the D-pad to use your special, but never tells you that you can push Y to use the other character’s special.

As for the gameplay, there’s no auto-scroll like traditional SHMUPs; instead, it’s wave-based, with enemy portals showing up around the screen for a second before spawning the enemies (like Towerfall Ascension, but without the different arena designs). Already, the game design has conflicts with the core mechanics since your characters could be anywhere on screen when the next wave comes, and you can absolutely get screwed over if one of you happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The bullet patterns on their own are fine, but Klaptraps will bolt towards you faster than you can move if you end up too close to them (even immediately after they spawn); birds fly towards you, but then keep going until they reach the screen boundary, where you can only kill them by putting both characters against and parallel to the screen border; there are even laser-shooters that’ll just keep moving in one direction, and if you end up in the small area they cross…

…you get the idea.

Still, the worst one is the miniboss in level 2. With all the others, there’s at least the pretense of a warning (even if that split second foreshadow animation will certainly go unnoticed among the chaos caused by the rest of the enemy wave). With the level 2 miniboss, however, it can teleport to a random spot on the screen, including on top of one of your characters, dealing contact damge in the process. This isn’t even a fluke or an “I was going in a direction and suddenly the boss teleported in front of me”–no, I mean it literally shows up dead center on top of your character, with no way to escape or anticipate, and it can happen multiple times in one life. I almost gave up right there.

And all of that is to say nothing of the fact that even the well-designed enemies tend to spawn near the screen border during average enemy waves (or even in corners where it’s nearly impossible to hit them), or that ALL bosses spawn regular enemies to cause more chaos on top of their usual patterns. Plus, if your characters end up too far apart, you won’t be able to keep an eye on them both.

Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, the devs made the game very forgiving. Each character can take three hits before dying (though only one needs to die for you to get game over), and you get invisible checkpoints every three-or-so waves. You’ll absolutely still get game over a bunch of times, but your hp always gets restored to full each retry, even if it wasn’t full when you reached the checkpoint. You can basically just tank your way through most of the game, and even if you have trouble, you can just grind up your special meter (which only ever goes up each time you game over) and use it to make short work of minibosses and even normal bosses (you definitely don’t want to waste the special on regular enemies because of how long and tedious fights against bosses and minibosses can be). It wasn’t until the last level where the enemy waves themselves started to kill me regularly, but that resulted in me noticing something I hadn’t before: I wouldn’t always encounter the same waves as earlier attempts, even when I clearly hadn’t made it to the next checkpoint.

Yup. Turns out this game…

…has PROCEDURAL GENERATION (one of my biggest pet peeves). And no, the game doesn’t have the Procedural Generation tag on Steam; I double-checked just now.

And to top off the game’s list of issues, there’s the final boss. It can summon vertical red lasers, but they’re in front of a red background, making it hard to see them if you aren’t looking right at them. It can summon orbs that effectively shrink the arena boundary until they’re killed, then summon enemies or teleport and dash at you from the now-blocked-off areas. It can shoot three rings of bullets that are a tight enough squeeze with just one character, yet you’re somehow expected to get through with two in quick succession. And that’s just the first phase (no checkpoint between phases, by the way). The second phase has more red lasers show up for the red laser attack, and the dash attack is faster. One of the new attacks is where it teleports and throws a slow projectile that leaves a smoke trail that not only blends in with the background, but is also harmful and stays up quite a while, then it can follow it up with another screen-boundary-shrinkage, causing you to take damage if you happen to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time (but you can’t really prepare because it’s random which attack the boss uses next, in both phases). I swear I only beat this boss by using my special to get past the first phase quickly, then getting lucky with the boss only using easier-to-avoid attacks (because of course its attacks are selected randomly and not synced to be possible-to-avoid in all scenarios).

And to add insult to injury, when you beat the final boss, the background turns blue (a color that contrasts with red more than red with red).

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this game. Even if you have someone else to play with, that only mitigates a small few of the game’s many issues; there’s still the numerous cheap hits and tedious bosses. That said, Steam only registered 115 minutes playtime when I beat the game, so you might be able to refund it if you have a similar experience as I did; just wait for a really good sale anyway (and ONLY if you can play with someone else who’s interested in the game), just in case.