This is really a game that just constantly has you improving every few minutes so the urge to keep playing becomes dangerously high. There's no down times or pace-breaking story, it's just pure arcadey fun but with a huge progression chain, so unlike large amounts of arcade games you still feel like you're aiming for something beyond a high score.

It's actually quite impressive how much content there is (of course I am playing a few years into the games life). It looks very empty at first, only 4 characters? Then you unlock a new one and it brings up many more. Then you unlock a secret character and it shows all the other secret characters. You're constantly unlocking new weapons and stages, the former of which is always fun to try and experiment with and see what evolves with what. While most of the stages are fairly plain, there's some fun gimmicky ones, like the newly added minecart stage, a stage based on Green Hill Zone with blocks similar to the special stages in that game which break after a certain amount of hits etc.

There's a lot of player-selected difficulty and challenges to be made by turnign on and off certain settings - no matter how much you upgrade, there's always an option to turn it all off to play as if starting a brand new game. But at the same time you can break the game in half by working out how to effectively farm golden eggs to create a character so powerful nothing can even touch you.

I found out this was supposedly made by someone using gambling psychology, except of course without the whole debt part. I'd love to see more vices be made into things that don't have their downsides, how about video games without the extreme time loss? 🤭

I guess as far as issues go, there's not many bosses that really do anything. Most of them just float around like any other enemy and try to overlap with your sprite to take you out. Towards the endgame there's definitely a sense that progression has slowed down - you're just playing to play now. While there's still stuff to unlock, you've already discovered the perfect item combos and can make a build to get you through pretty much anything, so a new item is at best worth a try or two, but lacks that excitement you get early on.

Very fun and massive amount of content for its price. Also a pretty good soundtrack.

I'm not gonna lie, I both really want to like and hate this game due to it's design. The idea for a roguelike with item synergies that deals directly with damage numbers on a 2D plane with a fitting progression curve sounds great. Gathering only 2 items for most synergies and becoming broken quickly, the flashy lights and sound effects ripped from an arcade machine at Vegas, and the overreliance on luck for synergy makes this game a slog and a pain. Every time I think "that's it, this game has gone too far and I've made a decision on it", I then begrudgingly play another 40+ minute game. 2 stars for a failed vision, because all of these qualities fundamentally work to serve the base idea for the gameplay, which unfortunately boils down to walk in a circle for 30 minutes and wait during animations.