Recent reviews by ShadowGoo

Kinda janky in a couple of ways, but strangely fascinating to play. You start out as one of five sea creatures, explore the ocean and battle other animals in underwater dogfights to conquer "reefs", most of which are submerged manmade objects. Defeating other sea creatures earns you both their genes and organic matter which you can use to power up the animals currently in your squad or breed new ones to use. Every animal has different max HP and weapon sets, and all of them can be either played as yourself as the leader of the squad or set as one of your five AI teammates. You could be a speedy-but-frail mackerel zipping around barraging enemies with homing scales and creating decoys to avoid taking damage, or the big and beefy cubera snapper, which boasts an impressive plasma cannon and brutal bite.

The progression is interesting, in that the reefs aren't really arranged in-game by order of how strong the enemies you have to fight are, so you can very easily stumble into a reef guarded by a bunch of bluefin tuna or miniature world war 2 battleships early on and get killed immediately. However, the enemies aren't hostile until you either go near their reef or shoot them, so you basically have to explore, choose battles you think you can win, and build your squad up until you can come back and fight the really tough ones. You'll also find creatures roaming outside the reefs you can fight to grind for genes and organic matter, if the need arises.

The game is visibly janky sometimes with some of its animations and spawn locations (one reef in particular would consistently spawn me above the water and make you drop awkwardly in before you can get going), and playing as any of the crustaceans is an exercise in frustration due to how cumbersome their movement is compared to the fish, but overall it's a weirdly solid and enjoyable game to play. Definitely worth picking up whenever it goes on sale if you're in the mood for something unique.

Grabbed this cute little game last year as a seasonal buy when it was in early access and don't regret it a bit. It's a sweet, humble little game for Halloween lovers. There's a lot of hard "retro-styled" games out there, but I feel like this one does "retro difficulty" very fairly. There's no continues so losing all your lives puts you back at stage 1, but the game is only five levels long, and you can grab a couple extra lives to work with if you know where to look. It's not super hard, but not a cakewalk either. Watch those insta-death spikes though.