Riddled Corpses

---{Graphics}--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad X Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{Gameplay}--- ☐ Very good ☐ Good X It‘s just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{Audio}--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good X Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{Audience}--- ☐ Kids ☐ Teens ☐ Adults X All ---{PC Requirements}--- ☐ Check if you can run paint X Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{Difficulity}--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Significant brain usage X Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{Grind}--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level X Too much grind ☐ You‘ll need a second live for grinding ---{Story}--- ☐ No Story X Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It‘ll replace your life ---{Game Time}--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short X Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{Price}--- ☐ It’s free! ☐ Worth the price ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{Bugs}--- ☐ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

Riddled Corpses is a fairly simple but fun twin-stick shooter with decent pixel art and quality chip tunes. It is not without its issues, though, which are as follows: - It is [i]extremely[/i] grind-heavy. The gold you acquire in-game is cumulative, and used to level up playable characters as well as purchase/upgrade power-ups. Each character level-up costs more than the previous, and each unlocked character will cost more than the previous for those level-ups. The best character for farming gold is the second-last one you will acquire, and doing the Survival Mode again and again and again does get quite repetitive. - You can accumulate gold in Arcade Mode too, but the stages progress very slowly. Also, before each level is a map screen you need to press Start on to begin a stage, but there is a delay before you can press Start, which on several occasions led to me button mashing the A button, accidentally wasting lots of precious gold on useless time-freezing powerups. - The HUD takes up a lot of space and hides enemies and pickups. Luckily, you can disable the HUD with the Select button, but then you don't know how much HP or consumables you have. - There is also a lot of clutter on the screen in general. Character bullets, especially at max level, are huge and often hide your character. Eventually you unlock a turret you can place, and the turret's bullets add significantly to the clutter. It can be hard to keep track of where you are at times. - You have a life bar that allows you to take a few hits before dying, and you occasionally find first aid kits that grant you additional HP, but if you are too close to a particularly large boss character when he spawns you die instantly regardless of how much HP you have. He also appears (randomly) in survival mode, which can lead to a quick end to an otherwise promising run. - Speaking of Survival Mode, it could have used a little more polish. You are evaluated solely on how many kills you get, so even though your score counter remains as part of your HUD, it stays at 0. Stranger still, enemies will continue to drop score-granting items even though they do nothing. - There is a combo system but I'll be darned if I have any idea how it works or what it accomplishes. Having said all that, the core gameplay is still pretty fun, and the tunes really are quite good (the Survival Mode tune in particular is frantically catchy). I like the choice of applying a cute pixel-art aesthetic to gruesome undead creatures, and I thought some of the creative choices were charmingly ambitious (like one stage being a high-speed auto-scroller on a highway, or the fog of war effect that is functionally useless but adds to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere). There is fun to be had here, but if you want to get all the achievements then you'd better be prepared to grind a LOT.

Shooter game that takes a lot of grinding unto building characters = Good past time

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TLDR: Fun bullet-hell with retro feel for extreme-casuals only and absolutely no one else. Loading this up for the first time, I greatly appreciated the intro cutscenes, retro tunes, and pixel graphics. The old-school arcade and NES nostalgia is more effective here than in other modern pixel-based games I've played. That's it for the purely positive aspects of Riddled Corpses. The rest of the game is a mixed bag. Gameplay mechanics that the player has control of are skill-based in the sense that it plays like a twin-stick, bullet-hell, wave shooter with the level shifting into different areas as waves complete. That part is cool. However, the design of gameplay progression means you can't beat the game based on skill alone. As other reviews note, progression is a grind, you must level up your character with gold you collect from defeated enemies, and stages are impossible to beat without grinding to level up. To make this clear: If your character is low level, your attack power can be so weak that you may not even notice a mini-boss or boss' health lowering as you fire at them. You essentially do no damage. Stupid design. For this reason, I can't recommend the game to anyone other than the absolute most casual of casual gamers. Riddled Corpses must be like water torture for skill-based completionists. Adding to the water torture is the slow pace of the game. It feels like everything should be 1.25x or 1.5x faster and, with the gameplay loop being a total grind, this really is detrimental. I enjoyed the hour I played so far, but can't see coming back to it for any reason other than mindlessly casual entertainment. I imagine the updated console version is much more satisfying. I haven't played it, but the design here is so dumb that I wouldn't suggest paying any more than $1 or $2 for the current Steam version. The devs and publisher should upgrade the Steam release to the console version free for current owners and no longer sell this version of the game. Edit: There is some fun to be had if you edit the local save data to eliminate the grind. Hence, my additional play time.