Desktop Survivors 98

This is a Hidden Gem

A unique take to the rogulelite genre that takes inspiration from vampire survivor. in the game your take control of your mouse as the player character where you lvl up and unlock new weapons to take down hoards of enemies while transferring different dungeons and battling many bosses

Fun game with some really pretty and nostalgic aethetics. Unfortunately, it does have a couple of flaws that kept nagging me -The gameplay is very repetitive. Go from room to room, survive the endless swarms of mobs for a minute or so, repeat until you clear the 3rd floor and enter an endless mode for grinding gold -This same repetitive gameplay against swarms favors weapons with AoE to the point where single-target weapons quickly fall off. Since they can kill only one enemy at a time, they rack up less kills overall. Since they rack up less kills overall, they get less EXP. Since they get less EXP, you level up less and they get weaker comparatively, until the negative feedback loop just gets you killed or you manage to find a strong AoE weapon to save you -This poor weapon balance is expressed in other areas. Weapons like the Fishing Pole, the Cursor Arrow or the Bubble Blower focus too much on single target, whereas weapons like .WAV, Paintbrush or Chess are just too good. Then, there are some weapons who are too gimmicky and unreliable to be any worth using, like Binary Bomb, cat.jpeg or the god-forsaken Lasso which is just way too annoying to use. -To add to the poor balance, some passive upgrades are flat out downgrades, like Game Over or Scheduler who increase enemy spawn rate or increase how long it takes you to clear a room. The intention of these "upgrades" is to boost how many drops you're able to milk out of a single room, but you'd rather choose something to help with DPS to kill more enemies faster and get more drops that way instead. -There's very little difference between areas beyond enemy layout. Progressing further into a dungeon also only boosts enemy health, damage and spawning speed, adding to the repetitive gameplay. It's because of all of this that the game feels more like an upgrade-type game rather than an actual roguelike one. Do a run, fail pathetically, but use the coins and unlocks you've earned to buy more upgrades to get further into the next run and so on. In this aspect, the game succeeds quite well with a huge variety of upgrades to choose from in the main menu and many bonus tasks to distract yourself with. Very worth its price if you go into the game with this mentality.