Survive the Squids

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Survive the Squids is one of many solo project bullet heaven games on the market, and this one is admittedly early in development. It being free also means it's hard feel cheated out on by the game's shortcomings. And to be fair, the game has a few interesting ideas, even if they're not completely original: instead of just having different weapons, players save and recruit soldiers who can then use different weapons. So it's one of those squad-based games, but unlike most bullet heaven games of this kind, our helpers can die if they take damage, meaning the player can actively lose firepower. With a lot of cover on the game's single map, there's a bit of a tactical element to using walls and such to block off or path enemies the way we want. Unfortunately, as of mid-July 2024, it really just isn't enough, and also not fully functional yet. A single map, minimal weapon and enemy variety, no permanent upgrades, no extra modes or anything to unlock. What you see in the first 5 minutes of gameplay is essentially the whole game for now. And even that does have some balance issues, weird hitboxes, slow gameplay (even if there's speed upgrades), not to mention how XP pick-ups seemingly s…

Game shows a lot of promise. I hope dev keeps improving it.

Glaring and huge flaw : the upgrade thingies, they don't despawn AND their number on the map is limited. Witch means there will be a lot lying around everywhere you went but not close to you, close to you they will barely drop. Also you lose units that you painstakingly upgraded but that could just be how the game is. Oh, and probably a bug, I can't get more than 4 survivors, even though it says there are 8 slots for them. Overall, don't bother. It's a sloppy game, not well designed nor coded.

You can play it if you want, but it's basically unfinished. In particular, the XP needs fixing. There's a max amount that can be on the map at once, so eventually there's enough scattered XP (which you have to basically step on to collect) that monsters no longer drop any XP. That's the wrong way to handle it, the creator should at least have made the oldest XP despawn instead (if they can't handle 'bundling' it)

fun for a little bit, not a whole lot of variety and after some time it becomes basically impossible to lose unless you purposefully kill yourself this game did come out yesterday so it's fine for a new release :-)