Category: Roguelite

Ball X Pit

Ball X Pit is Breakout X Vampire Survivors. There are a lot of things it does that I like, and it executes well on a most of it’s mechanics. Despite all that, I’m not sure that I want to recommend it, because I don’t really feel like I’m having fun with it. More on that later.

The Basics

Ball X Pit is easiest to describe in terms of just listing off all the places it’s cribbing features from. We’ve got the standard roguelike formula of incremental runs, complete with a 3-pick-1 system. The items in question are a set of brick breaker balls with special powers, and some side items. Balls can poison enemies, shock them in an AoE, split into more balls. These get bounced off enemies to deal damage, enemies drop EXP when the die, and the pressure is killing enemies before they meander their way to the bottom of the screen, at which point they punch you in the face.

Where Ball X Pit innovates is its fusion system, letting you take two balls, and combine them. Grab an Earthquake Ball, fuse it with Ghost, and suddenly you have a ball that pierces enemies while hitting them all with a massive AOE. There are also evolutions, combining specific balls to fuse into new, stronger balls, but these are a bit less novel, as both Vampire Survivors and Holocure had similar systems.

At the end of a run, you’ll be kicked back to the hub screen, a small city builder with a twist that’s actually quite novel. Instead of being your standard Farmville setup, you harvest resources by playing more brick breaker, launching your inhabitants into the village, bouncing off buildings to finish their construction, and across wheat fields to harvest them. These resources can be used to construct new buildings, and generally engage in meta-progression.

Then you’ll jump back into a run, perhaps with a new set of characters, better equipped for the given challenge. Rinse, repeat. Clear a level with enough different characters, and you’ll unlock another level.

It’s probably worth spending at least a bit of time talking about characters. At the start of a run, you’ll pick a character (later, you’ll unlock the ability to bring a second to set up interesting synergies!) to bring into the run. They bring a starting ball, some stats, and some sort of twist modifier. These are interesting, running the gauntlet from “shooting faster, but less accurately” to the one I’m using during while I’m doing this writeup, that auto-plays the game completely on their on own.

That character brings me to my main problems with the game: It’s really compelling, but around hour 5, I found that I wasn’t really having much anymore. I’m mostly ripping off a friend here when I say this, but the game feels kinda like looking at TikTok, there’s a point where you’re just a bit zoned out, but still present enough to keep going. After you stop though, you start finding yourself wondering what you just did for the last several hours.

It’s a shame because all the little things in Ball X Pit are pretty great. I love the low-poly aesthetic, the sound and music are good, and if you don’t like them, they’re easy enough to turn off, because some things I’ve played over the last few weeks, the game has a proper options menu.

It just keeps going

I had a different friend ask why I’d play 20+ hours of this if I’m not having fun, and I think I have two answers. The first is that early on, as the game is unfolding, showing off new systems, new characters, and new ideas, there’s this hope that it’s going to turn into something more then it currently is. I kept hoping that I’d unlock some subsystem that would crack the whole thing open. It’s also during the first few hours that you’re constantly unlocking things, finding new balls, new evolution and fusions with them, and just generally being entertained.

But this whole process slows down later on. Progression tapers off. There are no more twists, and the enemies, while having variety, don’t really require you to play any different. The game turns into a chore.

The second reason I played that much was to make sure that before I did this writeup, I’d really given the game a chance. Seen all it had to offer. And I feel fairly confident of that at this point.

I haven’t even beaten the last boss myself. Instead, I plugged in that character I mentioned above who plays on their own, and just let them do it. I bet there’s some sort of secret if I beat the final level with all 21 characters, maybe a bonus level, or secret 21st character, but at this point I’m just so bored, and frankly, don’t really want to.

Ball X Pit is $15. It’s not the worst $15 I’ve spent this week, but it’s not the best either. It’s an absorbing experience with clever ideas, but ultimately a slightly empty one.

He Is Coming

There are two types of games that will make me break out a spreadsheet. The first is the sort where there’s so much information, and I’m so invested in the game that I need external storage space. My brain has a lot of things in it, and only so much of it can be ciphers and codes.

The second is a game where I have become so frustrated by continual failure and by design choices that I either do not understand, do not agree with, or some combination of both that I intend to dissect the game to the best of my ability.

He Is Coming is one of the second.

Long time readers may have picked up that my write-ups are a bit formulaic. In part one, I introduce my feelings about a game (done that!). In part 2, I give a general overview of a game, mention its genre, and set up for the rest of the write-up. That’s where we are now, but I actually disagree with He Is Coming on what type of game it is.

He Is Coming calls itself a roguelite RPG auto battler. I take issue with two of those three labels, but as for why, let’s talk about how the game works.

At the start of a new run, the player spawns into a gridded map that they can explore. The map has a fog of war effect, so exploring reveals more of the map.

There are a few special types of things on the map, but the main two are opening chests, and fighting monsters.

(Side note: I’m glossing over the map, and the day/night cycle, and few other things, because they’re not very relevant to my main pain point with the game. I will say that the map is almost entirely an input only sort of thing. E.g. items you pick up almost never affect it.)

Monster battles are auto-battles. There isn’t too much to say here, as the combat is straight forward, and takes place automatically with zero player input. There are four combat stats: health, attack, armor, and speed. Both players and monsters have these stats. Attack is how much damage you deal per strike, health is much damage you can take, armor is a temporary health bar that refills after battles, and speed is who gets to go first.

When you defeat a monster, you get one gold.

There is a bit more complexity to this and how it interacts with items, but I’m not going to touch on it for now, because it’s not as relevant as items.

Chests are the standard 3-pick-1 roguelite item acquisition thing. They tend to spawn next to a single monster, but you don’t need to defeat that monster to open a chest.

The Problem

While I haven’t covered all the game’s features or mechanics yet, I’ve laid out enough to generally describe the “problem” I have with He Is Coming, and it has to do with the bosses at the end of the run.

A run in He Is Coming lasts 3 days. At the end of each day, you fight a mini-boss. At the end of day 3, you fight the zone boss. These zone bosses are always the same boss, and have much, much higher health pools and more difficult gimmicks than the mid-bosses.

Let’s start with Leshen and the Woodland Abomination as an example.

These are the two forms of the final boss of zone 1. He has far more health than any of the mini-bosses, and he hits much, much, harder then any of them. The end result is that the only way to beat him is to aggressively go over the top, and somehow have a higher armor+life total and higher attack than he does.

Here’s a (incomplete) list of weapons available in the Forest Zone. For the purposes of this discussion, just look at the Effective Attack column.

Forest WeaponsBase AttackEffective AttackNotes
Boom Stick24
Brittlebark43
Elderwood12
Featherweight23
Heart Drinker12
Hidden Dagger23Weird One
Ironstone Greatsword45
Razorthorn14Weird One
Redwood Rod23
Spearshield12
Sword of Hero36Set Item
Woodcutter12No really, you cannot build around this.
Battle Axe23Lesh has no armor
Bejeweled112Bad idea
Bloodmoon Dagger28Must get wounded for cap
Bloodmoon Sickle56Take 1 each turn

And here is the problem: The vast majority of these weapons are under 7 attack in a best case scenario. To win this fight, it’s almost entirely necessary to go over the top. Most of the pool simply cannot do that, starting much, much lower than required.

In short, most of these items are strategic traps.

Roguelites as a genre tend to be about working with you have, trying to make the best decision at any given point in time.

But the end bosses in He Is Coming break that design philosophy. They are so powerful that they close out entire sets of items and strategy designs, as those strategies simply cannot beat them. So instead of making the “best” choice, or trying different builds, I found it necessary to aggressively pre-plan and force a build to defeat them.

Here’s another example of this: the second zone boss, Swampland Hydra.

As you can see, I have died to this guy a LOT.

This writeup is already pretty long, so I won’t mince words here: I died a lot to the Hydra, before finally discovering a weapon that lets you remove status effects on yourself.

This led me to create a build that uses a status effect called Purity that heals and buffs on removal, and the aforementioned weapon to remove Purity and finally get a kill on this boss. Without using this strategy, the Hydra it builds up too many stacks of different types, and it simply felt impossible to win.

I cannot envision another build to do this. I’m sure it exists. But I’d have to look at every item in the pool, consider how to acquire them, pre-plan the build, and finally execute on it.

I don’t want to do that. I find roguelites fun when I can salvage a run from dumpster, or use knowledge to play around bad luck. But the bosses in He Is Coming just feel over tuned to the point that playing that way can never actually win.

One Other Possibility

I am open to the idea that I am just an idiot. That I have missed a critical portion of this game, or a core mechanic, or something that breaks this whole thing wide open. I know for a fact that I misunderstood how poison worked for almost 5 hours of playtime, leading to an incredibly frustrating loss.

But if I am, I don’t think I’m the only one.

Only about 40% of players have beat the first zone, with 8% beating the second. If I’m just stupid, I’m missing something, so are the vast majority of players.

I made the spreadsheet and those tables and the rest of this garbage because I wanted to see if I was missing something. I wanted to discover if I was misunderstanding a mechanic that would become clear if I just had a slightly bigger brain. A bit more external storage.

I don’t think I am.

Okay, but despite all of this, I actually really like the systems in He Is Coming

So, I’ve spent a lot of time so far discussing how He Is Coming forces a specific style of strategic play in order achieve victory, and how I don’t like that. Which is a bit unfortunate, because it means I’m not talking about the game’s interesting systems, or clever items.

My favorite set of items are probably the instruments, a set of items with the Symphony keyword, meaning that when one of them triggers, all the others trigger as well. It’s a fun idea, making it a bit of shame that they can’t do anything useful.

The backpack is also very neat.

Items trigger from left to right, and top to bottom, meaning it’s possible to set things up to resolve in clever ways. It’s another neat little system, though one I wish was a bit more meaningful to more builds.

Conclusion

I like most of the systems in He Is Coming, but right now I just can’t recommend it because of how it feels to play. It’s in early access, which means things might change, but it also means that they might not.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played, but I’m left wishing it was something a bit different. In that sense, it actually reminds of Loop Hero, not just because both have the ye-olde CRT style, but because of the gap between the experience I was hoping for, and the experience I got is wider than I would have liked.

He is Coming is $15 on Steam. If you love the idea of a sort of puzzle roguelite, analyzing builds, and manipulating systems, you might love it. As for me, I’ve had my fill for the moment.

Strafe could have been great

It’s been a struggle to find something to write about this week. Plucky Squire comes out later today, but I don’t think I can finish it before tomorrow. UFO 50 has a similar problem.

I was trying to finish every game Tom Francis ever made, and make that into a bit. But Morphblade is too short and I’m bad at it, while Heat Signature hasn’t grabbed me the same way Tactical Breach Wizards or Gunpoint did. I still intend to play it.

So instead I’m going to write a bit about Strafe, technically now called Strafe: Gold Edition on Steam.

Strafe wants to be a combination of a roguelite and boomer shooter, I think mostly in the Doom vein. I say “Wants to be” and not “is” because a lot of the meaningful roguelite mechanics are missing. There’s no 3-pick-1 upgrades, or branching paths. Its obvious roguelite features are just some light map randomization and permadeath.

I only have one complaint about Strafe. Unfortunately, it’s a big one, and I’m going to illustrate it with a million different examples.

Here it is: Strafe sucks at letting the player have fun. It has the fun moments, and boomer shooter experience, but it hampers its own gameplay in a bunch of stupid little ways. Lets go through them shall we?

A million little issues.

Let’s start with the guns. Strafe has maybe a dozen different guns. They’re all kind of interesting. They’re all fun to shoot. Cool! These sound like good things.

Except all of them have the most miserable ammo pool I’ve ever seen, and you can’t pick up extra clips for them. The player can shoot them until they run out of ammo, at which point they are useless. (The primary gun excluded)

There might be legitimate reasons to only give the player 8 rounds of rocket launcher ammo, but why do I only get a single clip of bolt pistol rounds? What exactly was the train of thought that went, “Hey, in our game with a dozen different guns, let’s not let the player ever really use more than one in a run”?

Also, it makes me run into the hoarding issue. Because I have limited ammo, I never end up using anything but my primary.

I’m just taking images from their press kit because I can’t be bothered to boot the game again.

Next up: Enemies. Strafe’s “thing”—if you want to call it that—is that the game makes it really easy to bunny hop. You basically jump around, gaining speed, to traverse maps quickly. So most enemies are fine. They either shoot projectiles, or chase the player, and are generally non-obnoxious.

Except there is an entire category of enemies that spit acid onto the floor, or spawn acid spewing orbs. The player loses health when they step on acid, and many of these enemies are semi-immobile and obnoxious to deal with. So the movement design says “Run around fast!” and the enemy design responds “Yeah, so you can step in the acid you stupid idiot.”

Speaking of things that make running around fast suck: dark levels. Why are they here? Did a single playtester ever say “You know what would make this fast paced permadeath FPS even better? Not being able to able to see anything.” Or did that just come to the devs in a fever dream?

Please note the 2 remaining rounds on this gun, after which it will be repurposed as the world’s least efficient club.

Also: Key Hunts. Strafe is heavily inspired by Doom, so of course it has doors that require keys to open. Keys that must be picked up. Do you know what I really don’t enjoy in my fast paced boomer shooters? Walking around a map for 10 minutes having killed all the enemies trying to find a single corpse holding a keycard.

Even the secrets are infected with this weird “Get in your own way”-ness. One minor one is the ability to pick up a Superhot style shotgun, making it so that time only moves when the player moves. It’s an enjoyable, clever Easter egg, that adds a cool level of control to movement. It’s incredibly fun pickup.

And it has 25 rounds, and you cannot switch off it to other weapons, or pick up barrels to throw while using it.

The End Result

Many games are bad because something about them is intrinsically broken. Bad art, bad narrative, bad mechanics. Strafe is bad because every single time it looks like it’s going to let the player have fun, it gets in its own way.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe the developers felt that they had to make the game difficult. Maybe they brought across design principles from Doom without questioning them.

I also don’t know that I really care. I don’t recommend Strafe. It’s not just fun enough to be worth playing.

But whatever. At least I got a writeup out of it.

Cobalt Core

I finished Cobalt Core months and months ago, and Fritz has been bothering me to review is ever since. So! To buy myself some peace and quiet, let’s talk about this sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder.

This game was made for me. I love roguelikes, especially roguelike deckbuilders—I’ve 100% completed Hades and Slay the Spire, and I’ve sunk countless hours into trying to do the same in Monster Train (not yet, but one day). I’m a sucker for crew-on-a spaceship games. And Crypt of the Necrodancer is one of my favorite games ever (published by Brace Yourself Games, the publisher of Cobalt Core).

So on paper, a spaceship deckbuilder roguelike that’s like if FTL, Hades, and Slay the Spire had a baby published by the publisher of Crypt of the Necrodancer would be the perfect game for me… And it is. Cobalt Core is fantastic.

The Mechanics

Okay yeah I guess I have to explain the mechanics.

You have a spaceship. It points to the top of the screen.

There’s an opposing spaceship. It points down towards you. Fight!

You and the opposing spaceship take turns. On your turn you play the hand of cards you drew from your deck, doing things like firing your blasters, activating your drone bays, shielding your ship, or moving your ship left and right. Your ships are aligned in vertical lanes, so that each component of your ship is lined up with a component on the opponent’s ship (or empty space). You’ll move your ship around to try to make sure that your blasters line up with the opponent’s vulnerable cockpit, and that their blasters line up with empty space.

The rest is pretty straightforward deckbuilder roguelike. Try to kill the opposing ship without taking too much damage (ideally none). Spend money to upgrade your ship with “relics” (to borrow the term from Slay The Spire) heal yourself, and add cards to your deck. Choose your route through each system between combat, hard combats, shops, encounters, etc. Each system ends with a miniboss, and you’re trying to beat the final boss.

And there are a reasonable amount of pre-run options. You can choose different ships with different specialties and configurations. Also each card in the game belongs to one of several suits, one for each of the crew members. At the start of the run you choose which 3 crew members you’d like to play with this time, and that determines what cards you can see. Each crew member has their own focal mechanics, like the one who’s good at drones, or the one who has strong attacks that overheat your ship.

The Story

Another place Cobalt Core really shines is its story. For a while, it seemed like roguelikes and story didn’t mix, and most deckbuilder roguelikes didn’t even try to have a story.

(To some extent, I wonder how much “writing story” and “designing card game mechanics” are skill sets that don’t overlap.)

When they tried, the narrative would be very very lightly implied with environmental storytelling. Seriously, why are we slaying this spire? Something something, pact with heaven, so now I’m on a monster train.

Then Hades happened, and suddenly every roguelike is trying to be character- and story-driven. It’s really hard to land that, but Cobalt Core pulls it off. The characters are cute, and I wanted to learn more about them. And perhaps even more challenging: the dialogue is good and funny. I’m not going to write anything more in order to avoid spoilers. Just go play it.

The one iffy story bit is how the story is rolled out. Whenever you win a run, you can unlock the next cutscene from one of the crew members you chose to play with. When you unlock all the cutscenes, there’s a final final boss battle and you can win.

I didn’t mind this, and I was interested to unlock all the custscenes. But the cutscenes got in the way of the “one more run” feeling that can make roguelikes so great. The most clever roguelikes even elide one run into the next so that you just keep trying. And Cobalt Core’s cutscenes do the opposite, interrupting my play experience and providing a point to put down the game. Even though I liked the scenes, I often found myself pausing the game and walking away without watching them.

I don’t really know why Hades is able to offer story in the hub without disrupting that flow. Maybe it’s because each of the dialogue updates you get from characters are so short, and there are always only a few. But I’d have liked to see more of that in Cobalt Core.

The Problem

In my opinion Cobalt Core has one big problem: there just isn’t enough of it. Is it worth the $20 price tag? Absolutely. In fact, go buy it now on Steam or Switch.

But I’m used to roguelikes really letting me test my mettle by giving me tons of difficulty ratchets and interesting achievements to chase. Cobalt Core really doesn’t have these. It has a few ships and 4 or so difficulty increases to unlock, but there’s no incentive to even play on those other ships. I had to invent my own personal goal of winning on highest difficulty with each of the ships, and even that wasn’t too hard.

So in short, go buy this game, play it, and then the studio can invest that money in adding to the game. I don’t even want much; just a list of arbitrary challenges/achievements, and maybe 15 more difficulty ratchets. Add those, and I think Cobalt Core is perfect.

Super Raft Boat Together

I had hopes for Super Raft Boat Together. Not high hopes; if the game wasn’t good, my year wasn’t going to be ruined. And likewise, Super Raft Boat Together didn’t pop my hopes like a balloon. It just sort of deflated them, like a bouncy house at the end of a birthday party. It was still fun to climb around, at least for a bit. But eventually it’s just a bunch of sad plastic, and you have to leave.

Super Raft Boat Together is a multiplayer top-down roguelite. The game’s twist on the genre is that instead of going through multiple rooms and challenges, the staging area is a raft. Said raft is apparently made of cake given the speed and ferocity with which it’s devoured by sharks and other denizens of the ocean if they aren’t shot before they reach it.

Mechanics

The structure on the whole is simple. Start a run, enter a zone. Fight off two waves of enemies, then fight a boss. After each boss, visit a shop and buy upgrades. After the final boss, start over.

Before I sink Super Raft Boat Together, I do want to say some nice things. The music is fantastic, and I love it. One of my favorite songs is used in this trailer. The actual gunplay and movement is pretty decent. I don’t love it as much as I love the music, but it’s not where my primary problem with the game comes from.

I have two zones of issue with Super Raft Boat Together, and how they intersect. Those zones are the roguelite mechanics, and the boss design.

Issues

Let’s start with the roguelite mechanics. I have a bunch of minor complaints here, so I’ll start with those. The game is pretty vague about what exactly its upgrades do, and to what extent. For example, one upgrade is “Chance to shoot fire bullets.” This is incredibly unhelpful. What’s my chance to shoot a fire bullet? If I get multiple stacks of that upgrade, is the chance to set them on fire additive or multiplicative? Or is it non-existent? Do fire bullets set enemies on fire, and if so, does that fire damage stack? Or do they just do extra damage?

How close? How much damage? I don’t know.

Compare this to something like Hades, or Risk of Rain 2, both games where items have explicit and defined properties, with delicious numbers included. (In Risk of Rain’s case, those numbers are on an inventory screen, but they’re still in the game!) Those numbers are important, because there’s a big difference between “+1% chance to deal critical damage” and “+25% chance to deal critical damage.” But Super Raft Boat Together doesn’t make this distinction, and this makes trying to create a build incredibly difficult, because very few items are explicit in their function.

It’s also not helped by what I’d describe as inconsistent or undefined terminology. A large portion of the game is building out the raft to provide space to maneuver during a run, but Super Raft Boat Together uses both the phrases “build speed” and “build rate” when talking about the rate at which the character generates raft pieces to place. Are they interchangeable? Are they different stats, and if so, which is which? I can’t tell from playing.

Both of these design choices make it much harder for me to engage with what I’ve always found to be a large portion of what makes roguelites fun: creating builds with synergies between various items.

The other thing that makes this difficult is that many of the items in Super Raft Boat Together don’t feel designed to be synergistic. There are very few items that scale off of other stats that can be influenced. My favorite example of this would be an item called Spectral Hammer. It’s only active when the player has died in a multiplayer run. In that case, it doubles their ability to place temporary ghost planks.

It has zero synergy with anything else in the game. I’m not even sure there are other items that buff being a ghost, and frankly, being a ghost is pretty useless. Better then nothing! But mostly useless.

So now, bosses, and boss design. I have several different categories of problems with the bosses in the game. Let’s start with the simplest ones: they’re pretty boring, there aren’t many variants, and several bosses share almost identical patterns (looking at you Giant Jellyfish, Giant Fish, and Giant Pufferfish). In addition, several of the boss fights aren’t boss fights. They’re just an extra wave of enemies. Shark Swarm, Ghost Swarm, and Fish Swarm aren’t bosses. They’re just an extra third wave fight.

The biggest problem I have, though, is with the game’s final boss, the Super Kraken. The Super Kraken is not incredibly difficult. However, it does something most of the other bosses don’t: it absolutely shreds every inch of your raft.

This would be mostly just annoying if it wasn’t for one mechanic I haven’t talked about yet: mercenaries and pets.

Mercenaries are hired with coins. Coins are added to a total between runs, but not kept between runs. Pets are bought with cash. Both mercs and pets are valuable sources of DPS, but like the player, they can’t shoot if they’re not on a raft. They also can’t build rafts, and pets will just float away if they get knocked off somehow.

Pre-Super Kraken
Post-Super Kraken, on the best fight I’ve ever gotten.

Unlike most other bosses, the Kraken will absolutely kill your raft, and kill mercs because it attacks a lot more of the screen (many other bosses will just actively target human players). This means that by the time the game loops, most of the raft is destroyed, all the mercs and pets are usually dead, and everyone is hanging on by a thread.

Which brings up another problem: there’s no shop after killing the Super Kraken. Instead, each player gets three free items, one of the highest rarity, and two more of variable rarities. Except many of those items won’t be damage items, and the second round vastly increases the number of foes, while also vastly buffing their health.

End result: It’s incredibly difficult to come out of the Super Kraken fight in a good position to continue the run, even if every player has full health.

It’s also hard to think of a reason to want to continue the run. The enemies are re-used, just with more of them. The bosses are actually now easier than the base waves.

Conclusion

Super Raft Boat Together isn’t awful, but none of its pieces click together. It falls flat on key parts of what makes a roguelike compelling for me, lacking both interesting boss variation, and meaningful and compelling build synergy. If you need a one time thing for game night, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it in many other situations.

If you’re still interested, you can find Super Raft Boat Together here on Steam. And you can yell at me for my bad opinions here, on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter.