Seconds Till Destruction

great quick game to pick up and play,

For what it is, an indie arcade roguelite hotline miami clone, it's a lot of fun. It doesn't have a lot of content or like a story, but it's still a great time :3 EDIT: I nominated this game for game of the year.

[h3]Better than Hotline Miami 2 turned out.[/h3] [hr][/hr] This is a neat little run-n-gun game that's very arcadey in how it plays. Each floor has a randomized layout & enemies, and the player is given a random weapon on each floor. This can lead you to seeing a lot of the same layouts repeatedly, but the randomized weapons and enemies keeps things fresh. As you clear more floors, the music builds up frantically and you start to see tougher and more dangerous enemies, which adds tremendously to the tension as you progress farther in. There's also 46 unlocks between new weapons and mutators, so the gameplay elements build at a steady pace between runs. A lot of the weapons are completly unique, so you have to think fast about how best to use them to stay within the 6-second time limit. You can also unlock mutators that change the gameplay in various ways, such as changing the time limit, doubling enemy speed, or halving enemy sizes. There's even a mutator roulette mode that changes mutators every floor in addition to the standard randomization, which adds an additional layer of complexity to the game. I do wish the game had a "Push X to start" feature for this mode (or just took longer to start between floors, or displayed the mutator in the corner of the screen), as some mutators have long descriptions and are hard to read through with how fast the level starts. I like the ai in this game, much more than some other run-n-gun games. There's a perfect amount of "dumbness" to the ai, where it won't immediately aggo on the player the millisecond it has line of sight and won't attack if the player is behind them. It's very close to the Hotline Miami 1 ai, and it works perfectly for the top-down-shooter gameplay. It would be very nice to have a scoreboard tab with your best runs and the mutators used. Good lord I've been playing revolver only with 0.5x bullet size (and shrink ray when I get it) and I want to know how far I get, but the only metric I have is the single score from a random run I did. Maybe score multipliers or bonuses for using different mutators? There's no score difference between running with pistol only on half-timer, than running an LMG only with double-timer. It feels like it lessens the experience a bit when your only metric is a single high-score that can be "cheated" in a sense by just using the easier modifiers. Overall it's a good game to spend some time on in my free time, doing a few runs every now and then.