Earl vs. the Mutants

The idea of being in a car instead of a dude on foot is an interesting take on the genre. It seems like it should be a fun twist. But there's this weird tension in the game where you're incentivize to run over enemies, but only some enemies because there’s some types that explode when you hit them (and they’re often mixed into crowds of other enemies). And there's some enemies where sometimes you can run them over without getting hurt, but sometimes you can't and it's impossible to time the difference because they come in swarms where they're all in various states of hurt/safe. I played a bunch of rounds and beat the first map on the middle difficulty. Unfortunately, that win felt like it was just an RNG blessing rather than being good at the game (I had a shotgun with explosive+piercing+splitting bullets with projectile count, RoF, and damage bonuses, an infinite boost upgrade, and picked up a shooting frenzy powerup during the boss battle that melted the boss in about 10s). It’s possible the game gets better the more you play and the better able you are to distinguish enemy types and attack patterns...but I don’t care enough to find out.

abandoned game

Good little game. There are some minor balance issues when you first start playing with the default car, but you can quickly bypass them after a few rounds of upgrades and then the game becomes a neat little timesink. There is a lot of creativity on offer. And it's priced extremely fairly. I don't know if there's compelling replayability, but certainly a nice game to have in your collection for when you have 10 minutes to spare. Probably the best game design decision in here is that the rounds are 10 minutes to the boss, so it's not endless unless you want another round. I think some people might miss an endless mode, but I don't think it suits any of the other design decisions they've made.

awesome game

If this were free, I'd give it a thumbs up but start my review with a word like 'middling'. Even at <£2.50, this game just has too little to enjoy. You're in a car, and you can upgrade the speed and boost, but the view is so zoomed in there's no collision on the trees because you wouldn't have enough control. There are enemies which hurt you to run over... so driving fast is a bad idea. This leaves you to just mostly drive in circles to avoid stuff while shooting, and I got bored of that within 3 minutes. Dialogue gets in the way, too. The 10 minute runs are far, far too long, as the gameplay has worn itself out even before then. Just over 1/4 of people have beaten the first level. That takes 10 minutes. Around 15% have completed a level on normal difficulty. This is a game that most people just don't bother with, it seems.

A surprisingly good game. I hope they make more.