Recent reviews by Beefyrulz

This game is an absolute masterpiece.
Though admittedly not terribly long for the main story, it's short and sweet.

The deeply frenetic gameplay is an absolute masterclass of game design all the way through to its core.
And the story which is primarily told through radio communications between missions, is charming, witty and satisfying with fantastic vocal performances. The characters and their performances feel very human in their tone and delivery which is extraordinarily refreshing.
And the actual gameplay is both challenging and rewarding and feels absolutely amazing to play, and with additional challenges and objectives for those who want to put their skills to the test.
As well some additional content to supplement the story and challenge missions for those particularly inclined.
It wouldn't be out of place to describe this as a faster-paced first-person Hotline Miami in terms of the intensity.
And with quick mission reset, chasing those S-Ranks and bonus objectives is quick and painless.

Only real gripe was I noticed weird stuttering and slow-downs on certain missions and I'm not sure why. The game runs beautifully otherwise and isn't very graphically demanding.

Ultimately, there's no frills, no fluff, just a great story with great gameplay.
And some bumpin' tunes to boot.

I've been holding off on giving this game a review because I really wanted to give it a fair chance and put it through its paces.
But unfortunately after ~33 hours (at time of review) I've concluded that the game is simply too broken to be able to recommend in any good faith. In spite of whatever positives it may have, or what few there are anyway.

The elevator pitch for this game is something like 'STALKER but Fallout 76'
But they also decided to keep all the horrible game breaking bugs of Fallout 76 too.

Without going on and on about every single bug I encountered, it really boils down to the game and server simply refusing to function as expected or even within reason. This coupled with an already clunky game itself aided by similarly clunky design all culminates in what is unfortunately an incredibly underwhelming and disappointing experience.

Though some credit where credit is due, the game does have most if not all dialogue fully voiced, which is great.
But if you don't really care about the story or the dialogue, that doesn't leave much else.

The gunplay is barely functional, the weapon customization is fairly inconsequential, and the weapon variety is all but absent. While there are a solid handful available, there really is precious little to distinguish any weapon from another of the same class, or even iterations of the same weapon. While higher tier weapons do get very minor perks, most do precious little to really affect gameplay in any meaningful or noticeable manner.
On top of this is how rare most weapons actually end up being. Though there are crates around the world that always spawn and typically contain a random weapon, they frequently contain a similar and small variety of weapons in my experience. Meaning you can loot the same chest maybe a dozen times and get the same two or three weapons. And while that may just be bad RNG, it certainly begs the question of how many weapons even are really in the game to be able to keep getting the same ones by dumb luck alone.
And as mentioned before, any two iterations of the same weapon are going to be statistically and functionally identical, as in, no randomized stats. Which for some might be a good thing because at least when you get a gun, you know what you're getting in terms of stats/functionality. But it does make looting the same items over and over excruciatingly repetitive and boring. A little randomization would definitely make acquiring multiples of the same weapon a little more interesting because the varying stats could affect how they're used. But that's just my personal taste more than anything.

The quests can be pretty hit or miss. Again, credit where credit is due, it does seem a fair amount of thought and effort has gone in to designing storylines. And even though I admittedly haven't paid much attention to most of them, the little bits I've gleamed do seem reasonably well thought out. I just personally don't care for any of that. But the real let down of quests is that most yield pretty useless or meaningless rewards.
A majority of the time all you get is a fistful of currency, a few consumable items, and usually a card item for the games in-game card game battler. Which if you never interact with that minigame (which there isn't much point to outside of boredom), these cards will be completely useless to you as a player.

And just to round out the review because it's already getting pretty long in the tooth, I just want to quickly mention that the anomalies in the game are annoying more than anything. Though not horrifically frequent, they are often littered all over the roads between POI's and in later area's of the game make certain sections of the map nearly impassable and for no real reason other than to justify their existence.
Also the item durability mechanic is just plain irritating. While not as bad as some games, personally I'm just sick of item durability in games, especially online games. Especially considering each death degrades all equipped items ~10% or so, which the game never even explains, you just suddenly notice when all your equipment is about to break. Of which this durability requires resources to repair (higher tier resources for higher tier items).
Even if the argument is to try to encourage players to use lower tier gear normally and only take out higher tier gear when strictly necessary, the game still does a very poor job of this. At best, it's poorly executed, at worst, it's poorly designed. In either case it makes for a very unenjoyable experience. And while gathering resources to repair isn't enormously difficult, it's just an extra layer of tedium that simply doesn't need to be there.

Were this a free-to-play game, it might at least be worth a try.
But for $30, absolutely stay as far away as you can.
I do hope the game improves over time, but it is not worth playing in its current state.

I remember playing this game a lot on a friend's account a long time ago.
The other day it popped up again in my memory and I figured it'd be fun to go back and play an old beat 'em up and maybe try to finally beat the entire game.

Unfortunately, come to find that the game is entirely broken and simply does not run.
There's a supposed workaround provided by the dev(s) in the discussion, but that was last updated back in April of 2025. It's nearly 2026 with no updates and the alleged workaround simply does not function, or at least not properly.

Though I remember the game itself rather fondly, I simply can not recommend a non-functional product.

I want to like the game as it's sort of Risk of Rain meets Vampire Survivors.
But the game is borderline nonfunctional and actively punishing for no reason.
And don't let the promo video fool you, what you're seeing is literally a debug/dev build where they cranked up the stats to make the game look more interesting than it actually is, or than what you'll actually be playing. It is genuinely impossible to achieve what you see in the promo without cheating the game because of the way things are structured.

First off, a lot of the items and or stats in the game either do not function as described or at all for that matter.
The most obvious of which is "Health Regen" Now first of all logically one would expect that the number for 'Health Regen' would be, y'know, the amount of health you regen. So with 50 health regen, you'd expect to regenerate 50 health within a specified period of time. But no, that's not how it works at all. In fact it doesn't work at all period.
One run I had something like 200+ health regen with ~150 max HP. But whenever I would take damage, my actual regen was never more than 1-2 per tick, which is the same as what it was even having minimal health regen (<10), so either someone did some very bad math, or this stat doesn't have any remotely logical function. Even after avoiding combat for a bit to see if maybe the tick rate would speed up or the amount would increase, but no, no matter what my health regen was never actually more than 1-2 per tick.

Another item that straight up did not function most of the time was the Key item, which is supposed to give a percentage chance to unlock a chest for free, ~10% per item. Now I understand the game is clearly following a similar logic to Risk of Rain in that you get diminishing returns from each item, so in other words, 10 keys does NOT equal 100% chance. But that being said, with stack of at least 7 keys, one should be able to expect a pretty reasonable chance to unlock chests for free. Yet on my runs with high key stacks, the item would proc maybe once or twice per run despite dozens of chests being opened. So even with the base 10% from ONE key, that math still didn't add up, much less for 7 or more.

Then items like the Battery which are meant to increase attack speed by 8% per item, didn't seem to add much or anything to attack speed. As even with some 5+ stacks of these items, my attacks didn't seem to be much faster if at all.

There are lots of other examples of items not seeming to do what the claim, but I think I've made my point thus far.

Another thing that's extremely rough in this game is the player controller, as in the actual physical game object what controls the player. Not only is it the most slippery slidey thing in the world, like ice on roller skates, the acceleration/inertia is abysmal. This coupled with the fact that enemies physically stun you every time they hit you as well as impart a painful amount of inertia, getting hit is absurdly punishing in a game where you're constantly being hit.
Now admittedly I might be making it sound a bit worse than it actually is, but not by much. I've had plenty of runs be completely ruined because of this poorly designed system. Get one enemy that hits you in just the right way that knocks you in to other enemies that pin you against a wall and you just straight up can't do anything about it, and then you die.
Or an enemy falls on top of you from above, and because most enemies are faster than you (even with boosts to movement speed) they just get stuck on your character model until you die. Or the other way around, you try to jump past a crowd of enemies because it's your only viable escape option, and then you just end up crowd surfing to your death.
And as mentioned, even with various mobility upgrades (move speed, jump height, jump count) these barely seem to do much. While you'll notice the boost to your speed fairly immediately, it almost feels temporary because before long, you're still getting crowded by enemies all the same. So either the game is giving enemies additional speed or taking yours away or doing something else entirely stupid. All of which are terrible design elements.
Now this of course could be remedied by some form of actual movement mechanic, like the ability to do a dodge or something of that nature (Y'know, sort of how RoR had mobility skills exactly for that same reason). But of course such a feature does not exist in this poorly thought out game.

Another element of the game that seems to be entirely missing is the ability to unlock or use the additional weapon or tome slots present in the game. In total there are 4 weapon slots and 4 tome slots, pretty standard affair for a vampire survivors clone. But two of your weapon slots and two of your tome slots are locked with seemingly no possible way to unlock them by any means. Ranking up invidiual characters seems to only unlock more skins. Completeing quests only unlocks additional items or characters. Completing levels only unlocks higher difficulty versions of those levels as well as challenge modifiers. Leveling up in-game only lets you pick more item level rewards, and weapons/tomes don't seem to cap out at any feasible level. So as far as I can see there's straight up no way to unlock these slots, which begs the question why they're even there in the first place. Now I'm sure there's probably some stupid and obscure way to unlock them, but the game clearly seems to want to keep this core element of the game a secret. Why? I have no earthly clue. But if everything else I've seen so far were any indication, it's likely due to the overwhelming level of design incompetence from the dev(s).

One personal gripe, though I have half a mind to treat it as an objective flaw against the game itself is the inability to manually aim any of your attacks. Not only do they all auto-attack, they also all auto-aim. And there is an option in the settings to change the auto-aim behavior, but as mentioned at the top of the review, it's one of the many things in this game that straight up does not function. Your two options are "Smart aim" and "Closest Enemy". Smart aim seems to try to target the enemy closest to the center of your screen. And logically "Closest enemy" should be targeting the enemy closest to your position. But not only do neither of these options seem to actually do what they're intended to, changing them also seems to have no actual effect on how your weapons aim. Because regardless of this setting, both of your weapons seem to just aim at whatever the hell they feel like. I tried both settings, and I've had my weapons actively shooting at an enemy 20-30ft away from me while I had an enemy literally standing on my heels. So I'm not sure what's going on there, but it's definitely not right. Now this wouldn't be as much of an issue if there were the ability to manually aim or something. Which hey wouldn't you know it, there is a control available for "Aim", ah but once again, it does nothing. As well there's a bunch of crosshair options, but again, they don't seem to do anything because there is no crosshair.

Now look I could go on and on and on and on about all the things that this game is clearly doing very wrong, but I think I've covered enough to drive home the point that this game is a hot mess and really doesn't deserve your money or your time.

At the end of the day, like I said, I like the idea, but so many things are wrong with this game.
It's fun for a short while until you really start to see how bad or actively punishing the RNG is.
More than anything the one thing to take home about this game is that it doesn't do either of its inspirations justice in a way that you shouldn't just play the original games in the first place. Better of just playing RoR or Vampire Survivors, because this ain't it.

Initial impressions is it's Visceral Cleanup Detail but with fantasy elements and cute goblin maids.

Now I haven't got terribly far in to the game yet, but for all intents and purposes it plays much the same as VCD with some minor changes and a few additions. One change being instead of water buckets and a mop, you get slimes and a pitchfork. Stab the slime and now you've got a mop. When the slime's full of blood, feed it to the mimic, and there are no bio waste bins to fiddle around with, and likewise fewer gibs to manage. Speaking of which, incinerators are replaced with Mimics which you feed used slime's and other organic waste material, and maybe your friends too if you're not careful. One additional mechanic is the mana mechanic. Pretty straightforward, add or remove mana from various devices and objects in order to restore appropriate functionality. As well the sniffer device from VCD has been replaced with a simple 'scan' spell(?) that sweeps out and pings nearby targets based on what you choose when you cast it. Another nice QoL feature is an in-game progress tracker as well as a checklist for various areas within a level. Makes it much nicer to know for sure that you're 100% done with an area.
One of the more distinguished additions to the game is a progression system. You gain EXP for completing cleaning tasks and leveling up seems to unlock additional cosmetics. Which speaking of cosmetics, this game actually has character customization which is quite nice. I haven't figured out exactly how to get additional tickets (in-game currency) other than finding secrets You gain additional tickets for successfully cleaning a level, and a fair bit at that. But you can use this currency to buy new cosmetics for your character.

So the bottom line, it's Viscera Cleanup Detail but slightly simplified, minor QoL changes, cosmetics and progression.
Enjoying it so far, but I need to spend more time with it to get a more clear experience.
Normally I don't like to rush a review but seeing as how this game had none already, I figured I'd at least give it my first impressions.

As is with a lot of indie games unfortunately, great idea, poor execution.
Unlike a lot of roguelites though, basic survival is almost entirely dependant on RNG in this game.

The game suffers from a lot of very confused and conflicting design that simultaneously forces you to play in hyper specific ways while punishing you for doing exactly that.

The gunplay feels fine until you start using weapon mods (sort of the whole point of the game) in that most mods with any remotely useful benefit simultaneously destroy your weapons ability to function. Things like a weapon mod that allows you to fire a large volley of bullets, which simultaneously chews through your limited ammo with hilariously awful accuracy to the point that it's practically unusable. Or how most mods that have any meaningful effect on your projectiles (elemental, AoE, ricochet, etc) are their own separate ammo type and can not be used in conjunction with similar mods by the fundamental nature of only being able to use one ammo type at a time. Or even the more mundane stat-altering mods that increase your weapon damage by 25% while decreasing the accuracy by 40%, so y'know, a tiny increases to damage in exchange for not being able to hit the broadside of a barn at point-blank range.

Then there's the whole stagger mechanic, a not entirely terrible play on Doom's glory-kill mechanic, except executed much worse. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't a critically essential component of the gameplay in that if you want to have any real hope of clearing the bountiful hordes of enemies in any meaningfully quick manner, you will need to rely on stagger. Of which can only meaningfully be triggered by dropping a whole building on an enemy. Yes you read that right, dropping a building on an enemy. While in the tutorial and in early-game, they teach you to use small props and explosive containers littered around the map, the amount of stagger they do, or rather the amount of damage required to stagger enemies spikes very quickly. Quickly leading to the aforementioned 'building dropping' necessary to interact with what as mentioned is a core part of the games functionality.

Not to mention the whole levelution type systems in-place, while interesting, ultimately end up being more hassle than it's worth. Aside from its necessity in fighting enemies as mentioned previously, the only other thing it really does is clog up the already pretty claustrophobic arenas and make navigation even more difficult than it already is, which I'll go more in-to with the enemies and their attacks.

And again, this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the absolutely insane amount of enemies that start appearing pretty quickly. Early game, it's not quite as bad. But even in to the second stage of the game, you're fighting actual hordes of enemies. Which again wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for each and every enemy being their own personal bullet-hell generator, spamming literal walls of projectiles every 0.125 seconds, coupled with some enemies having ring-like AoE abilities that fire off constantly, while others have hit-scan lasers that instantly sweep across the arena without any notice, grenades and other AoE abilities, or enemies who deal damage simply by moving, no that's not a joke.
Suffice to say the game is less about avoiding damage, rather about finding a way to out-heal it. But as mentioned earlier with the stagger mechanic (the only consistent way to get health mid-fight), it's pretty much just a matter of time until you inevitably die.

Now in regards to projectiles and other enemies attacks, one saving grace that I'll give the dev(s) is that they can be seen through walls, which kinda helps for keeping track of where things are. But it's a bit of a double-edged sword in that it simultaneously obfuscates things. When enemies are relatively few, it's much easier to see, distinguish, and keep track of various enemy attacks and their whereabouts exactly in the world-space. But in later levels or when there's a lot of enemies around, and your screen space is pretty much 90% projectiles, it becomes basically impossible to distinguish which projectiles are in front of a wall and which are behind it. Especially when coupled with the fact that pretty much everything in the game has a 'glitch' effect associated with its visuals, including the projectile, which tends to lead to an absurd amount of visual noise, making it even harder to focus on individual elements like projectiles, attacks, enemies and their movements.
There are a few other small details which are very good and appreciated, some of which being specific audio cues to indicate game-events, like stagger and elemental triggers. But I can't give too many points for that since that's pretty basic game-design.

At the end of it all, it just makes for more of a frustrating experience than anything else, and ultimately very not-fun.
Which is shame, because as mentioned, cool ideas, just terrible execution.

No control over aim = automatic bad review.
So it is technically there. In a bit of an awkward menu but at least it's there.
Though I will say I do appreciate being able to selectively pick which weapon(s) auto-aim or not.
But the rest of this review still stands.
Game's already mediocre enough as-is, mouse control would at least be some saving grace.
But as it is, fundamentally it's a copy/paste of every other survivors-like, including the flaws of all its predecessors.
The addition of level-based gear feels relatively pointless for tiny base increments to stats. The 'orb' menu is a bit clunky and while the benefits are somewhat useful, they still don't make a ton of difference, especially earlier on when their powers are minimized by the smaller slot sizes.
Not to mention the overall progression feels absolutely agonizing. The difference I've felt between starting the game and 4 hours in is virtually nothing. My overall survivability went up a tiny bit, but other than that each run still feels basically the same as the first. The only real difference is the experience of what weapons/artifacts to pick and how to upgrade them throughout a given run.
I wanted to like this game, but then they didn't do anything new or really improve on the formula.
The best thing I can say about it is, "It's another survivors-like" but that's really not saying much.

A pretty tasteless aim trainer cosplaying as an arena shooter basically.

I understand what the game is going for, it's just not fun.

I love the art though, and I'm not just saying that cuz heheh boobies.
With or without the nudity, the characters are cute enough and the weapons and animations look pretty damn cool.

The voice lines are honestly pretty cringe though, and I hate using that word but there really is no better way to describe it.
Like just trying way too hard to be edgy and or ironic and funny, but it just doesn't hit. And I promise you, it's not a sense of humor thing cuz I laugh at some pretty crass and stupid things.
I mean ♥♥♥♥ they have not one, but two different Thanos jokes in this game and neither of them land.
Just reeks of 'How do you do, fellow kids?'

Another thing that really grinds me is the game LITERALLY begging you not to refund it whilst also backhandedly insulting you for even considering it. Like literally every step of the tutorial ends with something to the affect of, 'Wow yeah this mechanic is weird huh? Yeah don't refund the game like an idiot now.' While I get that's probably a poor attempt at cheeky humor, it really just comes across as toxic. Like it's self-aware but in the wrong direction. Hell even the top-pinned discussion is literally, "A Message Regarding Refunds" where, you guessed it, the dev(s) beg you not to refund the game.

Then one personal gripe (though also a technical failing from a developmental perspective), the 'Music' volume slider does not affect the main menu track. Though it does work for the other two tracks in the game. So while not a particularly egregious issue, still mildly annoying at worst. As well since this bug doesn't explicitly detract from the gameplay, it could honestly be overlooked. Like I said, this is a personal gripe more-so than anything, but come on that's not a hard fix.

Now look, I get it, game development is hard. BELIEVE ME, I GET IT, better than most anyway.
But a bad cake is a bad cake.
It doesn't matter how many or how few people baked it,
or how experienced or inexperienced the bakers are.
A bad cake is a bad cake.

That's just all there is to it.

As excited as I was to see the next chapter of the Hyper Light series, this chapter is all around a bit of a clunky mess.

I feel like the game has good bones but suffers from plain incompetence from a game design pserspective.

To me most of the issues become almost immediately apparent after doing even a few runs, so how they didn't get caught during development I have no idea. My guess is the devs did not properly playtest their game at all.
I'm talking actually playing the game from square one and trying out the progression, because it does not feel good.

The combat all feels very clunky as well. Stiff animations, sticky collisions, enemies body-blocking dodge/dashes completely nullifying them, poorly indicated attacks, enemies being annoyingly accurate, etc.
Without going too in depth, just trust me when I say the overall implementation is poor at best. You can kinda brute force your way through it, but it is absolutely not the deeply frenetic and satisfying combat of its predecessor, not by a long shot.

As for overall style, the graphics are pretty nice. I always liked the style of Hyper Light. But the menu design makes me want to vomit. I can't quite put my finger on it exactly, but navigating menus is very frustrating and not intuitive. I think partly because the menu design seems to pull from the AAA sphere of design philosophy in its layouts and implementation, yet somehow even clunkier than in AAA games. Suffice to say it feels like they took an already bad design and made it worse.

Then there's the rogue-lite elements. For starters I can't for the life of me understand why they went with rogue-lite in the first place, but even more than that is it's sort of an awkward blend between an RPG and a rogue-lite. All equipment has levels and you can give your character permanent stat upgrades using certain materials.
Which I don't mind the RPG elements since they give some kind of permanent upgrade as you progress. Although these stat upgrades are tied to each specific character, as the game features a sort of 'hero' style roster of characters to play as, each of whom you have to unlock of course. But that's neither here nor there.

Suffice to say in its current state the game feels like a bit of a flurry of ideas loosely cobbled together in to a barely coherent package. It absolutely does not live up to its namesake.
I really do want this game to succeed, but it can not do so in its current state.

Honestly it's a pretty simple and relaxing little cooking sim game.
No time pressure to get orders done, a wide array of recipes and custom orders to keep you on your toes. Different mechanics each stage to keep things from getting too repetetive.

Strangely enough this is one of my go-to 'play after work' work games.