Megabonk

Megabonk is a good game, but I'm giving it a negative review to be a counterweight to the 95% positive opinions out there. I would rate it "mid" 😉 My main criticisms: the progression is weak. There are really only 2-3 "levels" in practice, and the tiers are just higher difficulty settings, not new content. Every run ends up needing pretty much the same tomes (XP, DMG, Luck), not much variety. The gameplay itself is fun, for about 10 hours, then it gets stale. If you're not chasing movement-tech improvement and instead want (like me) meaningful incremental upgrades between runs, the meta-progression just isn't there. Which is a shame, because the different characters are really cool. Compared to Halls of Torment or Vampire Survivors, Megabonk just doesn't measure up. Maybe updates or a successor can improve on this.

Is it just me or did the dev take the money and run? All the massive balance issues are still present, we still only have the same levels from launch with one weirdass speedrun level... aaaand that's it. Oh, but he went out of his way to add hats. Yeah. Hats. Not content, hats. It's definitely not a money thing, the game blew up due to its vibe and humor, which is the best thing about it so far.

Abandoned and not very well balanced. Either you bonk forever, or waste 10-15 mins of your life.

I'll probably change this if it ever get another update, but 8 months since the last one when this feels like an early access game isn't good. The game is fun but it gets repetitive fast and then you're just grinding for unlocks and getting destroyed on the hardest levels.

i have now owned this game for a little over a day. It is seldom anymore that a game brings that childlike joy and fun back to me. This game does just that.

abandonware.

TL;DR - Cool concept, bad execution I've tried to like this game and revisited it multiple times to try and make it click, but unfortunately it has not changed much for the better. Keep in mind I consider myself a roguelite enjoyer with thousands of hours spread across different survivor games, so for this to not land is quite a tragedy. The 3 core problems of this game are difficulty scaling, "the luck economy" and enemy balance. 1) This game scales way too fast, especially on higher difficulties. The game will throw extremely dense spawn waves at you at set intervals, sometimes with slow, mostly harmless walking melee enemies that you can dodge, or enemies that spam ranged attacks and spawn aoes under you. If your build hasn't scaled up enough to deal with them by the time they spawn (which is often less than 4 minutes into the run), you just get overwhelmed and die. This also necessitates that you build your characters in a certain way to outscale the game, which turns it into a meta arms race instead of "haha fun roguelite experimentation". More on this later. Other issue is how insane the enemies spike in stats between zones/floors. Megabonk doesn't scale enemies within a zone much, but it does backload all of the scaling to the next floor. E.g. a skeleton on zone 1 with 20 health now has like 500 in zone 2, even more if the difficulty is cranked up. What's more terrifying is their damage also scales like that. If you DARE to absentmindedly pop a miniboss shrine in zone 2, it's almost guaranteed their basic attack will oneshot you. Bosses also scale absurdly; a 5k hp gateway boss in zone 1 will have ~100k in zone 2. So again, this game forces you to build like a meta slave to outscale the absurd pacing that it throws at you. Which brings me to the point of "the luck economy". 2) "If you wanna enjoy the game, 3 out of 4 tomes are must haves" The game has a meta holy trinity - XP Tome, Luck Tome, and later on, Cursed (Difficulty) Tome. Only your 4th tome is up to personal choice. This isn't to say you can't beat the game on entry difficulties with other tomes of your choice, but once you get to difficulty 2 and 3 you really feel the game beating you over the head with this scaling meta. Luck makes everything you are offered rarer. This obviously compounds and has a huge early game spike. XP gains also help you scale faster which means you kill more things efficiently which means you gain more xp, so it's another compounding factor. Difficulty makes enemies harder but drop more loot, so again, compound scaling. The problem with the game is that it's very badly balanced to the point that at minimum Luck and XP tomes are mandatory to keep up with higher stage scaling. It kills a lot of the illusion of choice; the same thing applies to weapon/skill choices as well. More than half the weapons in this game are meme fodder and picking them outside of a "quest to kill x" is basically griefing your own run. With other games like Vampire Survivors, Halls of Torment, Risk of Rain etc, you are encouraged to lean into each character's strengths and scaling their main stat usually makes sense. On Megabonk I am running 80% of the same loadout per mission with minimal variation because otherwise the game will beat me to death with it. Aegis for example gives you so much survivability compared to any other defensive layer in the game that you would be stupid not to take it. But even Aegis won't always save you from some enemy designs... 3) The enemy AI in this game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥. There's not really another word that encapsulates it. The game sells itself on the idea that you have a 3D plane to dodge around and jumps to avoid ground damage, but all of that goes out the window against certain enemies and bosses. There are some levels where you cannot stand still long enough to circle-kite charge a shrine, because the game spawned 200 enemies that cause shrine-sized explosions under you. There are bosses with lock-on attacks that kill you in 2 seconds if they touch you; with a full defensive build, mind you (looking at you Anubis head laser), and you might say "lmao skill issue don't let the laser touch you" - except it has very fast tracking and can spawn next to you, so if your character doesnt have insane speed to go behind the boss in half a second, you're gonna get locked on and die, while everything else in the map can barely scratch you. But if you scale your character speed too fast, when enemy swarms spawn, you'll run straight into them because they spawn under you! What fun game design! Anyway, The game's cheap for 10 bucks so you don't lose much if you don't believe me, but I wouldn't spend that money if I knew what I did now.

Certified BONK