Tesla vs Lovecraft

Great game to play, when you have 10 minutes to kill and don't want to start a long quest of a "big" game or when you don't want to use your brain and only want entertaining action instead. Starting the game and playing a round takes 3-5 minutes. Instant fun.

+ Shooting feels OK + Tesla + Reasonably priced + Runs fast - Looks and plays like a Unity asset flip. - Extremely grindy on difficulties higher than normal. You need to complete the levels multiple times to collect crystals in order to buy permanent upgrades. Doesn't sound so bad until you realize that an upgrade can cost 100 crystals and you only get 2-4 per level. If you don't miss them that is, since they have a nasty habit of spawning just before a level ends. This was surely done on purpose as it happens WAY too often. - RNG is god on higher difficulties. Perks are pretty much random and if you get really unlucky, you won't stand a chance in beating a level. This synergizes perfectly with the point I mentioned above, increasing the already excessive grindiness. - Monster power scales to levels gained on a map. I hate this with a passion as it means that the game punishes you for increasing the strength of your character. At the very least they could introduce varying monster types (even if the only difference was their color) so it wouldn't be so blatant. Instead they just increase the stats of the creeps. This is simply lazy development.

#Summary (66%): If you consider shooting a vast horde of eldritch monsters fun, then Tesla vs Lovecraft is your game. If unpredictable randomness and a grindy unlock system bother you though, steer away. #Review: 10tons has a reputation for its excellent indie top-down twin-stick shooters. Tesla vs Lovecraft follows that same path, combining elements from two previous hits, Crimsonland and Neon Chrome. But, as it turns out, merging two good games does not always yield a fun result. If you ever played a shooter from 10tons, you know that their combat is exceptional. Movement and shooting feel responsive and visceral, every weapon behaves utterly different. We can also summon a giant death robot from the heavens to shred thousands of monsters for us. We are treading knee-deep in dead eldritch abominations… so why is it boring sometimes? Well, it starts with the randomiser. Weapons are even more of a gamble than in Crimsonland—if you get a wrong starting spawn, you might as well reset. A similar notion goes for the perk system: too many of them feel useless, yet sometimes those are all we see. Once you reach the later stages, get ready to reset each level—a lot! Which brings us to the other fly in the ointment, the progress system. Although there are no microtransactions, the game behaves as if it had them. The grind is on par with the worst mobile games and “live services”. We need permanent boosts for the later stages, but they cost an arm and a leg. Even with the daily challenges, it can take days to buy one tier of a single ability. Honestly, I would go as far as saying that this game is unplayable without the DLC because that helps to alleviate the grind somewhat.

Fun for few hours, but the difficulty doesnt scale well, and replay-ability feels low to me...

It pulled me in and became a fun cathartic way to blow off steam. Wrecking havoc through London while putting down the forces of madness and chaos is an enjoyable time. Most of the weapons are fun to use and the environments have many destructible elements. I feel like there was missed opportunity for a lot more story. The game sets up this great theme of the human progress, natural science champion Tesla versus the chaos, supernatural insanity champion Lovecraft, but it doesn't really take it anywhere interesting. It seems like potentially fun ground for a pulpy tropey story but ends up as wasted potential in my opinion. There is a little cutscene at the beginning at the end and that's it. The "lore" page is kind of a joke and the writing on it could have been way more compelling. The focus is really the action, and it does a good job there. There is a good variety of weapons and abilities. The sound effects and graphics make things feel satisfying. There is that cool thing of being the lone fighter holding off a tide of darkness. It does get more grind intensive the more you progress. Enemies get more numerous and powerful, and you have to collect enough crystals either in game or through completing challenges to be able to unlock enough perks and abilities to adequately respond to the increasing difficulty. There is a strong element of randomness in the game. It gets to a point where passing a level depends on getting the right weapons or perks/abilities at the right time. Weapons and abilities appear on the map randomly, and you can pick perks but only out of the limited ones you're offered. Plus when you walk over a new weapon, you automatically pick it up and start using it even if you don't want to. So those are annoyances. Even so, I still ended up playing this quite a bit and having a good time with it. Feels like it's been worth the price and time.