Dustbound

I am not sure I understand why no one seems to have been playing Dustbound. This game is very good and a quite enjoyable Bullet Heaven that anyone who likes the genre will certainly enjoy. It certainly will scratch that itch of destroying waves of enemies, bestowing a grand beating to the hordes with the occasional boss battle appearing out of nowhere. And returning to nowhere soon! Well, if you have a good build! I think the primary problem with Dustbound is that it needs some polish. There is some cruft from the demo version, and the way the deck interacts with the energy system is not explained well (although you will get it, I think some people may just move on from this game since it isn't demonstrated well). Calling things "turns" and expressing game concepts in that context makes sense to me now, but not when I started. Just the idea that your card plays are limited by energy per turn is a little confusing, and there are tons of ways you could make this obvious to the player and ease people into the game. The "in-between" base is equally mystifying and has a TON of potential if the developer chooses to expand on this. This area is where you get your persistent upgrades bet…

At best, worth for ~2-3h of play at deep discount - the competition in the survivor field is super high and this just falls below average. The main positive is that the spritework is good. The main two issues are - legibility is really poor as you get a lot of projectiles flying around; and the fact that the game is just trivial with no real goals other than some unlocks you can get done very quickly (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). The problem with the game being easy is that there is no point to engage with the mechanics too much, and it doesn't even feel like there is a lot of depth - you can get more than enough power to easily beat max difficulty from the start of the game by just upgrading cards to max and then spamming stat upgrades, while picking up damage dealing boons. Does not help that there are a couple of bugs and judging from the fact that there is a wishlist button (probably from demo at next fest), does not seem like there was ever even a plan to support it post release. Which to some extent is fair because seems like a small side project, but still.

Naw. It's just a bad VS clone with a ton of variety of spells - ugly, crappy spells that you can upgrade a lot. But its just not very fun. The card element is completely tacked in too.

Cool combo of deckbuilder and reverse bullet hell! I only wanted to have a quick peek tonight, but ended up playing an hour and a half. The onboarding isn't great to put it mildly, so it took me a moment to get the core mechanics, but then it was really fun.

This is the first time I've seen bullet heaven and roguelike deckbuilder at the same time, and so far I'm liking this. There's the bones of a great system in here; the UI takes some getting used to, but you get a feel for it fairly quickly. Looking forward to how this game develops over time.

Really unique game!