OTXO is a fun time, but as far as roguelites go, it's absurdly excessive. 40 straight levels of thundering gunshots and hordes of enemies, by the time you get halfway through it your wrist is gonna need a break from all the lightning quick turns youll be making. it took me 2 hours to complete the game, and i think that's a long time for a run to last. some bosses feel very samey, but overall it's just too relentless to enjoy a full 2 hours of non-stop action. especially when i cant adjust my mouse sensitivity (the oddest choice ever, what the fuck). hotline miami is the first thing to come to mind when looking at this game, and that's a fair comparison. top-down shooter, combos, and punishing combat, the two games are almost family. however, otxo lacks the methodical tactician mindset of approaching a hotline miami level where you solve encounters through continuous trial and error. otxo is very much the opposite. you think on the fly. you have no room for error because death means a complete restart due to the nature of the genre. the little planning you can make is to hold chokepoints to lure groups of enemies into a kill room. otherwise, youll be rushing into a room. hell-brazen with lead to spit out into the poor souls inside, turning them into pools of blood. otxo is a real fucking nice looking game, i dig the monochromatic art style. yet it's also too noisy. so much blends in together that it can be hard to find a gun on the ground, notice an enemy that's still alive, or, at times, even figure out where you are on the screen. but visual clutter aside, the biggest problem is progression. unlocking new weapons and perks feels almost right. buffs in this game are liquors you can buy from a bartender and saleswoman, they give you various attributes and effects that can be really good (e.g. dodging bullets refills slow-mo meter) or useless (e.g. kicking enemy bullets refills slow-mo meter). this was well implemented, it's nothing crazy and is a system found in many games. put money into unlocking new perks for future runs, yadda yadda. however, new weapons are locked behind an rng encounter. sometimes, when moving between levels, you enter a combat-free room with readable lore (which is alright, but I still dunno whats going on. I'm just guessing it's some allegory for purgatory) and a gachapon machine. the gacha machine is where you cough up some bucks to unlock a new gun, if youre lucky. see, sometimes, instead of a shiny new mac 10, you could get a little funkopop. so not only do you need to get lucky to get into the room, but you also need to hope to get a new gun instead of some plastic crap that gamers love. I mean, it's not entirely terrible. collectibles are neat, but cmon man, the gacha room was already a chance encounter. don't add more variables to possibly unlocking new guns!! because of this, i only got about 5 new guns out of the many possible others. not gonna completely complain, i got to kill the final boss with a lever action shotgun, but i really wish i got to see the complete arsenal and liquor cabinet. this game is not that hard. you can cheese it fairly easily with certain liquors and strats. I beat the game on my 4th attempt; I must be some super gamer, though, let's just say that. difficulty is very subjective, but once i found the ideal strat for clearing rooms and got the right perks, i breezed through level after level. bosses werent even a problem for the most part. they have well-choreographed attacks but are also quite easy to dodge. Only 2 of the bosses actually scared me by getting me to impossibly low health, thankfully one of them is the final boss. my point here though is that i first-timed every single boss encounter, dying to my own fumbles in previous levels. again, it could just be my hotline miami veteran skills kicking in, but it felt that i should've been grinding this game longer to then finally face the last boss.

i seemed to have been quite negative in this review, and that's mostly because i'm fairly disappointed by a game i was really excited to get into. overall, it's not bad; it's a good time if you ever felt the itch for a hotline miami esque roguelite, but don't go into this to expect the same awe of the hotline miami games. however, i still believe it's a quality game. the combat is satisfyingly explosive, quenching any thirst for explosive 2D ultraviolence. good game if you want a quick roguelite.