Swarm Grinder

Very good Vampire Survivors clone. More fun to play moment to moment due to dash and special attacks, but the metagame is nowhere near as strong. Nice anime and pixel graphics, good music, poor enemy variety and weapon variety.

Honestly. Boring, fast.

Pro: Nice synergy system with skills and power ups. Not a massive scaling system (yet?), but pleasantly effective power scaling. Pro: Aesthetically appealing atmosphere - simple color palate, good retro pixel graphics, and who doesn't love a fictitious female engineer to maintenance your killer mech suit? Con: Crashes my (moderately?) beefy gaming computer with pixel graphic overload. Skill synergy means I'm min/maxing on things like fire rate, explosions-per-crit, and increased-area-per-hit-at-next-cast (here's looking at you, black hole sawblades build). I have crashed multiple times with my own skill-based sprites, and died several more due to lag (despite heal-per-kill and . Perhaps a toggle to turn off some animations would mitigate that, but I understand this is a game in development. I repeat: this is a game in development - I expect that in time I will be able to successfully load Stinger into a level III garden map to progress the mech's level. I expect that the bioshard cost display will eventually remain permanently visible in the garage after a certain number of upgrades (discovering I could still pay for points was a surprise). None of these are "cons", just development feedback, and considering the positive gameplay aside from these things, I continue to rack up runs trying to hit those mech suit upgrade milestones and wittily phrased achievements. Also, question - is it intentional that not all methods of killing an enemy (like with stinger swarms/poison) count as "kills"? Dev request list (pretty please): - sprite toggle or max sprite cap to mitigate crashing/lagging - expressly indicate what counts as a kill - alternatively, expand what kill methods counts as a "kill" per the counter - some kind of increased visual difference when confirming selling a piece of gear vs. repairing it (yes, players will learn to look twice after their first accidentally sold-instead-of-repaired Epic gear, but that first time could also be avoided more easily)

cool concept and good execution, upgrades are that you would expect from normal roguelike, plus i appreciate that dev supports the game and doing meaningful updates

Love the game, but I found a very frustrating bug. Many times, I would say almost 90% of cases, when I cancel an upgrade, and try another one, it will keep the exact selection. I have to waste a reroll to get the actual items that fit the different update path. This is very frustrating because it ruins a run by making me waste rerolls and worst case take items I dont need, therefore waste upgrade slots.

Swarm Grinder is enjoyable, runs well, and feels well thought out. I keep coming back to it.

Bad: - Constant fuel drain when shooting. Imagine playing Vampire Survivors and you run out of ammo. - Collecting upgrades INCREASES your fuel drain. So while you want to collect upgrades, you really shouldn't, because they make the game harder. Also some upgrades really feel useless. - I don't understand the upgrade system. Picking up the same weapon as before sometimes increases its level, sometimes you get random other upgrades - which I most often don't want. - No objectives given. What should I do? It seems you have to free all the drills to progress. - You get swarmed the more the game progresses. Even while fighting the boss, more additional waves spawn. - Not optimized: As more creatures spawn, the framerate begins to drop. - Meta upgrades feel like they are necessary to progress in the game. On the other hand, there are few of them. - Little content: Only three robots to choose from? And like three levels? Good: - Good music - Graphical detail / style is good Overall, it feels like an early access title which needs work. Obviously, the game is long past that phase. Not recommended.