I don't know if I'm just having a rough go with games at the moment but all they do is irritate me nowadays.
Even older ones I used to enjoy, like this one. Maybe it's because I care about my time more now, I don't know.
Void Scrappers is such a weird game.
Not mechanically. Mechanically it's perfectly solid. 'Vampire-Survivor-like set in space'.
The gamepad support is PERFECTION. No mouse cursor left onscreen. You can rebind any button. Responsive.
The characters are all different enough to justify existing, which is super important in a Survivor-like.
The combat (the actual game) makes sense, the UI is fine, the skills are fine, it doesn't make any huge mistakes with any of that.
Where it falls down is in the replayability. Which is also super important in a Survivor-like.
It's just too tough, and in unfair ways.
The dev will no doubt say something along the lines of 'I've made changes to make it easier'.
And they are correct - they have.
Let me explain why those changes were ineffective due to inherent design flaws in the base game itself.
The dev doesn't understand the concept of rewarding the players' time. Perfect example, you can't complete a run. It's not possible. You finish a run by dying to the enemy.
No 'congrats you did it' screen. No sitting back and feeling a sense of victory. None of that. Just enemies that get harder and harder until you cannot possibly overcome them.
This means that literally every single run is a failed run. How these other reviews consider this 'relaxing' - being forced to die with no hope of actual success - is well beyond my ken, I'm afraid.
What do you call a game that doesn't reward the player? It's not a game, is it?
This isn't a game. It's an app.
It gets worse. You collect credits so you can increase your power. With most other survivor-likes, you can max out a single trait (earn extra XP, do extra damage, stuff like that) after a few runs, even if they're failed.
On this app, you could play for literally hours on end and still not be able to max *anything* out.
One star because it runs as intended. Another because the gfx/sound are excellent.
I want to give a third star because the gamepad support is so good, but frankly the game itself is just too time-cruel for me to justify another star.
