Black Future '88

+From the music to the visuals it is a complete nostalgic future trip. +Great for short sessions. +Lots of perk+weapon combos to be discovered. -The visuals can be a bit much, luckily you can tone them down. -The game is meant to be played over and over. The boss introductions need to be skippable or reduced the more playtime logged.

The game is overall pretty cool: aesthetically, it's close to a masterpiece. Graphics and sound are both amazing, and the narrator's voice is as cool as ever, June's voice will never cease to amaze me. Yet, gameplay-wise, there are a lot of little errors that make the game frustrating and frankly unamusing: - PERFORMANCES: It's the main problem I got with this game: what the hell is going on with the optimization ? I read somewhere it was due to the engine the devs used, but here it's frankly ridiculous. Forget the required specs, get a pro-gamer CPU cause this game is about to melt your pc. Can't feaking play for 10 seconds without having a massive drop in FPS, which, as you can imagine, is a disaster when you're playing a nervous shooter like this game. I just can't enjoy a game that laggy. It's a strange universe in which I can play Payday 2 without a lag, butI need to step up my hardware to play a pixel-art 2d platformer. If the optimization is that wrecked, why not give the player more options to tweak the graphics ? Like less SFX, or getting rid of those foreground animations. - That's basically criminal: Guys, you know putting art in the foreground that hides your character is a crime, why did you do that ? - What's that dash anyway ? The Dash feature, which is the game's main way of going around, is clusterfucked, dodging bullets when it feels like it and leaving you to die when it doesn't. - Poor variety: This game suffers the comparison with its elders: Enter The Gungeon, The Binding of Isaac... The amount of weapons and passives are incredible in these games, not in this one. It gets boring after the 25th run where you see the same 5 skills cycling over and over. - Let me breathe: The amount of time required to pick ups consumables is ridiculous, especially in latter levels. You'd have to melee your ennemies to get them, but don't count on that: the game's basically a bullet hell past the 3rd level.

The game does a lot of things so so right: the style; the soundtrack; the brutally efficient world-building; the fast-paced kinetic gameplay; the satisfying hook of the life-timer; all awesome. You have 18 minutes to live. Can you survive and get to the top of the evil megacorporation fast enough? The more time you spend exploring to acquire better weapons and abilities, the closer you get to impending death. But if you don't take the time to get a better loadout, the baddies will be incredibly tough to beat. It's perfect. The one problem in the game, is that despite having a large selection of weapons and special abilities to combine for an insane amount of potential character builds, many of those weapons and abilities are just not worth bothering with. I began the game wondering what sort of cool combinations and strategies were possible, and by the time I played enough to unlock everything I found that there are relatively few fun or effective builds. It's not a huge flaw, but it makes having such a wide assortment of equipment a bit of a mirage. Ultimately your goal is to do as much damage in as little time as possible; anything else is cosmetic. That said, the game is a blast. One of the better things about it is that even though there is roguelike randomness at the core of its experience, the game rewards your skill and quick thinking such that regardless of what is handed to you, progressing and winning is decided by your actions and not the rng. That's what keeps me coming back to climb the tower each time: even though I've only beaten the game once, I know every time I have a chance.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this game, but I picked it up on a sale and was pleasantly surprised. It plays a lot like other games like Rogue Legacy, Enter The Gungeon or Neon Abyss, but offers its own unique brand of charm. I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the controls or the visual choices made by the developers. One aspect in particular that you have to get used to are the flashing lights. They have a seizure warning at the beginning of the game that should not be taken lightly.