Iron Crypticle

A seriously moreish and tight retro twin stick arena shooter with a phenomenally good push-your-luck scoring system. It's up there with Nex Machina on my twin stick shooter leaderboard.

This is a surprisingly fun game. If you like Smash TV or other dual stick shooters give it a try.

One of the best arcade twin stick throwbacks I've played in a minute. Very strong Gauntlet and Smash TV influences, but unlike other indie retro throwbacks, this one knows what clicks, what's special about that coin op experience. Very strong fundamentals, very fun core gameplay, the scoring system is very fun... and sure, the roguelite elements are kind of a eyeroll, but they don't define the core of the experience, they're more to spice things up in the long run. Kind of a banger tbh

delicious arcade action

[i]A Modern Day Robotron[/i] 7/10 A solid Robotron-like without the excessive rainbow spectrum color blinding nonsense of the original. Central to arcade style games is the score mechanics and IC does a good job here of making item collection satisfying and interesting. The ledger collection for all of the available pickup items is a nice touch. Replay-ability is pretty high esp in the endless mode. Some of my dislikes come from how power ups work and certain enemies. 1) Weapon power ups are both timed and ammo limited (of which there isn't that much to begin with). I think they should have just picked one or the other here, both feels unnecessarily punishing. 2) Too difficult to determine which spell you have equip based on its "Rune Sign". Nobody is going to memorize those weird glyphs and I found a few of the spells to be a really big distraction. 3) Ranged AoE attacks do not show a ground marker for the area in which they are going to land. This causes a bit of a guessing game about where you were standing when the attack went off which I dislike. With a few tweaks here and there and I would have scored this higher but its still pretty good for a quick play here and there.

great game, simple, fun, replayable and skill based