Not really sure of too many other games of this style to feel as if each unlock you get after a point outright worsens the experience but I genuinely feel like after a certain point, the fun of this game just entirely dries out due to having too many ways to essentially be able to "solve" what RNG is present here. The first few hours here are honestly pretty neat, having a lot of different elements of discovery all wrapped up with a game that's fun in a "numbers go up" sort of way, with a selection of upgrades that you need to vaguely strategise about which ones you take to balance between offence and defence while practically constantly unlocking new stuff to mess about with as well.
While basically none of these individual elements really call for you to majorly change how you approach the game, there's still some appeal in both mowing down thousands of enemies while also constantly upgrading in some attempt to last that bit longer, sometimes having to compromise your ideal loadout for what would be convenient at the time. Unfortunately, it really doesn't take long to unlock the vast majority of the weapons and upgrades in the game and once you do you end up realising that there are very few of them to the point where getting your "perfect run" once you've picked up a few permanent upgrades is basically a given, which is made even worse with the way that basically all of the weapons you get in this, especially later on, are things that require minimal player input to actually utilise, turning a lot of lategame scenarios into standing around for 15 minutes watching colours and numbers flashing across the screen while doing literally nothing other than very occasionally walking a few steps so a boss enemy doesn't kill you.
The first couple of times this happens it's pretty cool, since there's a lot of appeal in completely breaking these games wide open, but the magic is lost in this case when basically EVERY run ends up becoming like it as long as you evolve a couple of weapons, which is basically bound to happen. It's made even easier with the amount of different ways you can control the RNG the game has, and while boosting your odds through these sorts of methods can be pretty interesting usually, the amount of these avenues provided to you ends up entirely trivialising one of the main dynamics of the game that was engaging in itself, as now it's very simple to just entirely what you control on any given run without any real thought or skill involved in the process. If provided a loadout you needed to follow to the T, it's something that any average player could do basically every time without fail once you've gotten a few rerolls, banishes and skips, and once this point has been hit, all sense of variety becomes deeply artificial since it ends up wholly relying on the player to engage with it in any sort of way, which doesn't really work when so many weapons don't require the player themselves to do anything particularly different with how they approach it.
In a game that so strongly encourages optimisation of your build to be able to dish out increasingly ridiculous, screen clearing attacks, making said optimisation so simple and effective always feels like a bit of an odd decision, especially since that seems to just further discourage actually using different things once you've found something that seems to just obliterate everything. For a game that tries so hard to make for an experience that just bombards the player nonstop with increasingly flashy effects and the like, actually hitting the stage where this occurs feels exponentially less rewarding with each new tool in your arsenal when it ends up feeling like a totally solved game that's so easy to work out how to solve it, until it really just becomes an exercise in standing 100% still for extended periods of time to unlock the final batch of upgrades that feel entirely meaningless at that point since you've already got everything that lets you win without a reason to ever use anything else. Despite all of this I don't think the game is entirely worthless or anything like that either, as the first part of the game where you're building up to the first couple of fully broken runs is a fun time that kept me fully engaged, it's just that anything past that point starts getting really repetitive and hollow to me, despite the fact that there's still a bunch of content the game wants you to get through at the point this happens.
While basically none of these individual elements really call for you to majorly change how you approach the game, there's still some appeal in both mowing down thousands of enemies while also constantly upgrading in some attempt to last that bit longer, sometimes having to compromise your ideal loadout for what would be convenient at the time. Unfortunately, it really doesn't take long to unlock the vast majority of the weapons and upgrades in the game and once you do you end up realising that there are very few of them to the point where getting your "perfect run" once you've picked up a few permanent upgrades is basically a given, which is made even worse with the way that basically all of the weapons you get in this, especially later on, are things that require minimal player input to actually utilise, turning a lot of lategame scenarios into standing around for 15 minutes watching colours and numbers flashing across the screen while doing literally nothing other than very occasionally walking a few steps so a boss enemy doesn't kill you.
The first couple of times this happens it's pretty cool, since there's a lot of appeal in completely breaking these games wide open, but the magic is lost in this case when basically EVERY run ends up becoming like it as long as you evolve a couple of weapons, which is basically bound to happen. It's made even easier with the amount of different ways you can control the RNG the game has, and while boosting your odds through these sorts of methods can be pretty interesting usually, the amount of these avenues provided to you ends up entirely trivialising one of the main dynamics of the game that was engaging in itself, as now it's very simple to just entirely what you control on any given run without any real thought or skill involved in the process. If provided a loadout you needed to follow to the T, it's something that any average player could do basically every time without fail once you've gotten a few rerolls, banishes and skips, and once this point has been hit, all sense of variety becomes deeply artificial since it ends up wholly relying on the player to engage with it in any sort of way, which doesn't really work when so many weapons don't require the player themselves to do anything particularly different with how they approach it.
In a game that so strongly encourages optimisation of your build to be able to dish out increasingly ridiculous, screen clearing attacks, making said optimisation so simple and effective always feels like a bit of an odd decision, especially since that seems to just further discourage actually using different things once you've found something that seems to just obliterate everything. For a game that tries so hard to make for an experience that just bombards the player nonstop with increasingly flashy effects and the like, actually hitting the stage where this occurs feels exponentially less rewarding with each new tool in your arsenal when it ends up feeling like a totally solved game that's so easy to work out how to solve it, until it really just becomes an exercise in standing 100% still for extended periods of time to unlock the final batch of upgrades that feel entirely meaningless at that point since you've already got everything that lets you win without a reason to ever use anything else. Despite all of this I don't think the game is entirely worthless or anything like that either, as the first part of the game where you're building up to the first couple of fully broken runs is a fun time that kept me fully engaged, it's just that anything past that point starts getting really repetitive and hollow to me, despite the fact that there's still a bunch of content the game wants you to get through at the point this happens.