Pathogenic

one of the best roguelites ive played if not the best all though the game can be a bit hard

ES

Overall i had a lot of fun with this game so far. I would definitely recomend it to anyone who enjoys games like this (Bullet-Hell Rogue-Light), it is 100% worth the small money that it costs. Short Review: The game is fun and has a lot of potential. Enemy and level design are amazing and interesting. The music is exceptionally great. The combat is very basic, but feels natural and works fine for what its trying to do. Lacks a bit of replayability and diversity between runs. The few negetive points could easily be fixed in future updates. These are my biggest negative points i had with this game so far, first in short and after in long form. 1. The item pool, far not enough different items, too many bad items, only a few builds that actually work. 2. The difficulty spike, enemies from level 4 and on are far harder and have massively increased health, the level 6 boss is basically unbeatable if you dont have a very good build. 3. The character starting gear, very unbalanced, some characters can almost guarantee a good run while others feel nearly impossble to play. 4. Game content, there is by far not enough, theres only 6 levels and 1 secret level that are always the same. Could get boring after having played a run with all the characters, of which there are only 7, and 1 of them can only be played in local coop. 1. The item pool Yes, there are technically a few different weapons and items in the game, but it dosnt feel like it simply because most of the weapons and items are just lacking behind in power. Most weapns are just objectively bad and are barely even useable in the later levels while a few other weapons are crazy strong and can carry you with little support. But the attack infusers, which are basically giving different effects to your weapons, are the biggest problem. Most of them do literally nothing. Why would anyone sacrific an internal item slot just for a 10% chance to slow an enemy for a second or to leave poison clouds that deal like 10 damage per second? It just feels bad to finish a hard boss and as a reward you get to choose between 3 items that you wouldnt even want for free. 2. Difficulty spike While level 1, 2 and 3 are farely easy and give you a bit of wiggle room for the items you choose, level 4 through 6 get incredibly hard if you dont have the right weapons and a full build already. Level 4 alone introduces 2 enemies that give others protection from damage, an enemy with shots that home in on you and traps that fly through the room and damage you. Not to mention that the health of enemies spikes pretty fast after level 3, basically if you dont get a new leveled up weapon or powerful buff per stage, you WILL fall behind in damage instantly. The peak of it all is the heart boss which almost feels like you are playing a completely different game. Literally everything in this boss room tries to kill you, projectiles, lasers, waves, spawned enemies, and even the floor itself deals damage. The whole fight basically burns down to the question if you have enough damage to kill the boss before your health runs out, because you WILL be hit every 5 seconds or so. 3. Character starting gear The items you can choose from at the start differ between all the different pathogens you can play. The idea behind that is amazing, but sadly beacuse of the topic i already talked about in point 1., the starting gear is incredibly unbalanced. While things like the helmimth and the nano bot can start with powerful weapons, that can carry you through level 1 to 4 without even any big upgrades, most other things start with weapons that are struggeling in even just level 2. In my roughly 30 hours of playing this game, i had 2 god runs in which i had a build for basically infinite exp and health, and both of these were with the helmith character because of its super strong starting gear. You basically only need to find 2 items to achive this and a buff for spawning hearts that you can get after just a few level ups. 4. Game content With only having 6+1 different levels (skin, intestines, stomach, liver, lungs, heart and a secret one), the game has by far not enough diversity to be fun for more than a few days. The levels are always the same and never change, even tho the levels themself are randomly generated, the rooms are always the same ones. Its not unusual to even get the same room with the same enemies directly back to back. Just to compare that to antoher game, TBOI for example has 26 different levels (12 in the base game and 14 from DLCs) with differing paths you can take through them. The same problem comes with the characters. There are only 7 of them, and one of them can only be played in local coop. All of them can be unlocked within just a few runs and only half of the 6 feel like you are actually playing something special. The bactiria, fungal spore and amoeba are all basically the same just with a difference in how the item slots are aligned. While helminth, collector and nano bot have very different playstyles that makes them fun to test around with. Conclusion: The idea behind the game and the basics of how it works are all amazing. But it greatly suffers just from the fact that the game is new. It suffers from all the small illnesses that a new game has. The balancing is off, some things need a bit of a brush down or redesign and there is by far not enough things to do and/or try to keep the game fun for more than a week. I really REALLY hope that the devs keep working on it and give us a few DLCs with more areas, more characters and more items to play around with.