At this point my recommendation would be a "maybe", or a "game is good for a few hours of fun." I am giving it a yes for its potential, and because I really want to see it become the game it could be with some love. Game has MASSIVE promise to be one of the best bullet heavens out there and provide playtime similar to giants like Vampire Survivors, *if* it makes some much needed changes during this early access phase. I highly encourage all players to give specific feedback as much as possible so we can see this game realise that potential. - Upgrades balance issues. Builds are deceptively not as varied as you may initially think. When you boot up the game it's like wow, look at all these options, so many ways I can make my gun work, but after a couple hours it just becomes a sort of "take these upgrades" as some are more powerful than others, and the real "feel changing" upgrades i.e. splitting bullets, or explosive bullets, are scarce. Additionally, because there are so many upgrade slots (barrel, mag, etc), there are not actually that many different parts available for each one, meaning one build can have a good chunk of the potential options at any given time. - Enemy and area balance. Many enemies/areas feel out of whack and you often lose a run due to some insane moment of overwhelm, even if a build was coasting until then. This sort of unprepared ending feels really hard to play around and it's disappointing seeing a very powerful build suddenly die to an unbalanced mechanic. The OP confusion status in the Hives which can be chained, a wall of undodgeable projectiles, or a sudden enemy swarm that oneshots you. It feels like only the high roll builds have a chance at clearing the 25 minute boss, or even getting there, and it's a sort of diceroll each run wondering if you'll be able to make it there. Feels bad to not get the more powerful upgrades offered and be gimped. Or not to be offered them in time and have your run cut off prematurely. Upgrades need a good look over, the weaker ones being brought into balance. The last boss's contact damage hitbox is too large, extending up to his head and not just on the circular "base" where his body would touch the ground/player (hitboxes in general may need a bit of work), and he can outrun you at default movement speed so unless you're running the Dash movement ability, or have gotten movement upgrades, you will often just die, again limiting build variety and feeling bad after a long and promising run. The Hive area is unbalanced and incredibly hard to approach, especially considering its proximity to the starting zone. I felt disincentivised to start in any other area than the starting one as they feel too punishing in comparison, even with many meta-upgrades, and found myself repeatedly starting in the same place hoping for a high roll build that had enough AoE to enter the Hive to get the unlocks I needed there, which became stale after some time, repeating the same content. - Gun and Resource balance Many guns feel vastly inferior to others. I ended up running every game with the assault rifle as I didn't want to gimp myself or risk the inconsistency of the other weapons. The game is a bullet heaven with many smaller enemies, slower firing weapons feel intrinsically less useful for the game world. Overall, there's a feeling because of these various balance issues that runs become quite samey. You're inadvertently funnelled into mostly the same upgrade and weapon choices if you want to get far enough to collect enough resources to start unlocking the VERY highly priced meta upgrades. Resources in general feel too scarce and the game starts to feel unrewarding and grindy after a few hours trying to gather hundreds of an item for an incremental upgrade. - UI and QoL It is really unclear what the weapon part meta-upgrades in base are for. They should be specifically sectioned or indicated somehow to their component parts (e.g. it should be very clear x upgrade belongs to the Hellspitter Barrell or Ammo Rack or Chevron Charm, etc instead of them all just being in the same window and you've no easy way to tell them apart). It is hard to tell what gun part upgrades belong to which part of the gun in-run, this should be labelled. You should be able to inspect your gun during the upgrade window. Some guns have stat bonuses based on how many upgrade slots are filled but you have no way to see this when an upgrade is offered. Resources should potentially be grabbed by magnets, or there should be specific resource collecting magnets. So many get left on the floor and for a game that has such high resource costs and also incentivises movement with exploration rewards, this feels incongruent. Lots of other minor issues of convenience. Such as allowing a hotkey for toggling auto-aim, as I use auto-aim on my laptop yet there are instances I want it turned off, like focus firing a tower or a resource node, and don't want to have to go into the menu every time. - Performance and optimisation. Some builds overwhelm your computer with sheer projectiles and cause run-ending frame drops. This is happening on high end PCs also from YouTube content I've seen. XP gems do not seem to be combined to reduce floor object density. Overall Nimrods is really promising and this is why I feel motivated to write this review/feedback at all. With some good design choices and a bit of polish it be incredibly good and take off. Please keep working on it!
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