Rogue Blaster

The bullet heaven genre is an interesting one to me, because while usually some of the aiming and shooting is automated, there's tons of emphasis on movement, crowd control and finding the optimal weapon synergy to influence enemies around you. Rogue Blaster removes most of this by putting the player still, in an initially 180-degrees then a 360-degrees shooting gallery, reminiscent of certain VR games. This means you are effectively just aiming at targets, choosing rather similar weapons to take them down, with a lot of the heavy lifting done by the items that can freeze enemies, place turrets and whatnot. Speaking of turrets, the game's most unique mechanic is how the player can choose between matches to place walls and turrets around the fixed location, adding an extra layer of defense and some extra tactical elements to an otherwise rather stale gameplay. And ultimately, while there's skills to unlock and more, that's the game's main shortcoming: the basic gameplay that removes so ...

Weapons have a singular evolution path. There is only one ~30 minute hand-made campaign. Hard made just increases the enemy health and randomizes enemy spawns. Enemies generally just walk at you with few exceptions. Items don't feel very fluid to use, having to throw them out blindly at times to be able to use them all as they rapidly spawn sometime with a very limited carrying capacity. None of the eight guns feel very 'punchy.' Projectiles are fairly slow, and by the end of a run, you're screen is so full of particles and stuff, that you kinda just have to spin around where the radar is most red. and then it's suddenly over. No reroll on upgardes, so you can easily get screwed out of most evolution paths. There are some small dumb turrets you can place around. They seem to target the same thing even though it's usually massive overkill wasting their long cool down shots. All that aside, no movement is pretty lame. Half the fun of these kind of games is kiting large hordes of enem...