For the love of exploding "bullet heaven" or "reverse bullet hell" or roguelite survival horde defense genre is well documented at this point. But folks... What the hell do we call this sub genre?! Upgrade your Mech's arsenal to outlast the wave of alien monsters. Pick up items and crystals to level up, install and upgrade your Mech and establish fire superiority. Every Mech has its own control scheme and weapon installation slots, so make the right choice for the environment and your style of gameplay. Then, deploy your Mech to the ground of an alien planet and survive the drop! The Different Types Of Equipment: The Lazarus has four Dreadnought slots, two Primary (starts with Machine Gun), two Secondary and two Expansion slots. Each weapon and upgrade you buy in a game, except for health and armor plate items, has a designated type and each Mech has a unique allotment of how many of each kind they can equip. An easy way to find out the type of all the equipment in the game is to look in the Armory. In general, each type of equipment is meant to fulfill a role in your load-out. Primary weapons are meant to be your most reliable form of damage, having comparatively long up-times. Secondary weapons, as their name implies, are good for supplementary damage and tend to have long cool-downs or unusual firing patterns. Dreadnoughts start out relatively mild but scale well and are the only type of weapon that can evolve. Expansions are upgrades that apply to your Mech or your weapons as a whole, boosting things like firepower, fire rate, movement speed, etc. How Armory Upgrades Work: The Armory allows you to buy upgrades that take effect when you buy the related weapon or power-up in-game Once you get some Cavarium, the game’s meta resource that you spend on permanent upgrades that don’t expire between runs, you can spend them at the armory to buy upgrades to weapons, expansions, and passives. You can refund spent Cavarium freely and with no cost, so you can customize your load-out best on your plans for a run. While most upgrades either apply passively to your Mech or apply across all instances of a weapon that you buy in-run, keep in mind that when you buy upgrades for Expansions, they only apply to the first instance of that Expansion you buy in-run. Some Weapons Evolve: Stand in the glowing circle to Evolve one of your weapons! Like in similar games, some weapons in this game evolve, becoming even more powerful versions of the weapon they were and sometimes, some even picking up a new functionality when they do. Dreadnought weapons are the only ones that can evolve in this game, and doing so is relatively simple. You just upgrade them until they’re level 10, then upgrade them again, which will mark their icon with the word EVO. A spot will be designated on the map with the icon of the weapon you’re trying to evolve and if you stand in that spot long enough, then you get a shiny souped-up version of your weapon. Crystal Processor Is The MVP: Less a Mech and more a building-sized weapons platform, the Aramech can hold four primary weapons at once. Its ability to give bonus experience per crystal is quite useful So, you’ve done a few runs and might have some Cavarium burning a hole in your pocket. While you might want to juice up your favorite weapon or buy some extra Emergency Shielding, consider instead boosting the Crystal Processor. While it doesn’t do anything for your combat performance directly, it does something even more valuable: it allows you to level up faster, which means you get more weapons and more upgrades, which means you’ll do a better job staying ahead of the difficulty curve and last longer in a run. Skips Are Dubiously Useful: Skips allow you to not choose an item for your level up, to help preserve your build should you not have favorable options. In similar games, Skips are useful to have when you have some experience in the game and know what kind of builds you want to use, since they allow you to mitigate the randomness of your options and make it so you don’t have to clog your build with items you don’t want. While they perform that function in Project Lazarus as well, because of how the game works, you’re probably better off not getting them unless you’re profoundly unlucky. Getting screwed by the options in this game just doesn’t happen that often, especially if you have your rerolls maxed out, since consumables will also show up in your level-up options. So if you don’t like any of your choices, either reroll or pick the health/armor boost since at best, you heal and at worst, you skip at no extra charge. You Get Walled In By Near-Invincible Enemies: These bastards put you between a rock, and a hard place, and will ring you in slowly If you get far enough in a run, these guys show up. They all look similar, looking like living boulders with club fists and spawning in a ring around you. They are hard to kill and not worth investing the effort in doing so. They deal a lot of damage to you if you touch them and will block monsters as they close in on you. While this might seem like a good thing, they also block most kinds of bullets, meaning you’ll have a harder time hitting the monsters behind them. At a certain point, when they close in enough, they die on the spot, but unfortunately the monsters they’ve been holding back will not and since they’ve massed quite a lot, if you don’t have the firepower to mow them down, they’ll likely swarm and kill you. A good way around this is the Pulse Rifle weapon, which phases through enemies and damages them at the same time. You Have To Kill A Bunch Of Penguins: Penguins start showing up late into the Artic Stage. Yes, you know those adorably funny tuxedo birds that live in Arctic climes? Yeah, you gotta mow those down in droves in the last few minutes of the Arctic stage. Sure, you can argue that you’re in a building-sized Mech, so in theory those penguins are similarly humongous, but does that make them any less cute? Less tragic to mow down? Do you enjoy games like Vampire Survivors, Greedland, and Super Smash TV then you will enjoy a stroll through Project Lazarus.
Read more