Cellosseum

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"Cellosseum" is a somewhat casual twin stick shooter/bullet hell game where you get to live every gamers fantasy and be a cell. Huh. So, dry and boring premise meets dry and boring gameplay. No wonder this wasn't a success. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs to pretend they're mobile phones or Commodore 64s. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 5 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad…

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Nova Drift clone? If you look at the studio's page, it's made by one or more students from Michigan State. It's free and it's a pleasant fun 15 minutes to 1 hour waste of time. If I think of it as a finished indie game, it's terrible. If I think of it as a student portfolio project/ demo/ early access, it's very promising and interesting. The animation and sound-design is good. The entire thing has a biological feel to it. It can be fun or frustrating depending on your choice of build. As for feedback. A few more upgrades, or an infinite/ repeatable upgrade mechanic would have really helped the game. Some skills are also buggy (mitosis in particular). Also the background/ environment design is terrible from a game design perspective, as it's very hard to figure out what's actually going to interact with you on-screen, vs what's just some aesthetic background element. There's very little really to give a negative review here, given the background of the studio, and the fact that it's free. Expect an interesting concept, like you would see on itch.io, not a full rogue-lite bullet-heaven.

Short, simple, and funny bullet hell game. Good variety of upgrades and enemies. Mild difficulty. There's some replay-ability in the way that you can create different core weapon/shield combinations.

The difficulty becomes extremely trivial as soon as you get a shield upgrade. I got bored about 10 minutes in.