Test Zero

I was Able To Brute Force the Boss Since the Healing Given By the Robot Makes Damage Less concerning. Every Weapon is a Pistol of Some kind which Kind of Makes The gun play Bland. There's Nothing that Makes Me want to come Back to this Game For Seconds Unlike other Rougelites. You come back to Balatro Due to Your Gambling Addiction. And You Come Back to Hades for Its Story, Art, and Gameplay. But this Game Just doesn't that Something to make it Good and Make Me want To Play Again.

Test Zero is a pretty fun little roguelite shooter that I liked mainly because it combines platforming with fast cyberpunk combat. I play through a mysterious test chamber where I have to fight other test subjects, collect resources and keep pushing forward. I enjoyed how quickly the game throws me into the action, because there is very little standing between me and the next fight. The shooting and platforming work together nicely. I have to move through the procedurally generated rooms while dealing with enemies and trying not to get caught in bad positions. I liked the feeling of having to manage movement and combat at the same time, especially when the level layout gives me limited space to work with. The platforming also keeps the game from becoming a completely standard top down shooter. The resource system adds a useful reason to keep exploring. I can collect materials and use them to craft better weapons, which gives each run a sense of progression. I enjoyed looking around for resources instead of simply rushing toward the next encounter, because finding something useful can make the next section noticeably easier. The procedural generation is another strong point for m…

Fun for 20 minutes. Super easy, I'm not great at platformers and I don't think I ever fell below half health. Dev may want some more options, be able to trade back a gun would be nice but honestly, it's fine. This is a student project, it's free, and fun- so nice job.

"Test Zero" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is a rather poorly made platformer shooter with no real reason to want to play it... you basically just jump around procgen levels and shoot stuff, badly. What was most remarkable about this is that the pixelcrap assets don't even match, some are high res, others aren't... a real dog's breakfast of a technical implementation. As always when developers can't even get the basics right, it's never a great gaming experience. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obvi…