Steel Thoughts is a top-down bullet hell roguelike that wears its inspirations on its sleeve, whereas additionally including a brand new spin to a now properly worn style. Developer Whirllaxy Restricted have made use of a beautiful pixel artwork model to craft a novel mech cyberpunk shooter, however how does it fare inside an already jam packed roguelike class of video games? The reply isn’t a decisive one; regardless of its attention-grabbing additions, Steel Thoughts additionally suffers from problematic port dealing with. Let’s dig into it additional.
Steel Thoughts’s premise is that you’re a small robotic going from room to room, killing enemies earlier than transferring to the subsequent room. The flooring are cut up into interconnected rooms with a boss on the finish. When you’ve overwhelmed the boss, you progress on to the subsequent flooring. The bosses are essentially the most attention-grabbing components of the gameplay, producing bullet hell blasts and large sweeping actions. They fluctuate from leaping robotic gorillas to massive floating robotic brains and spinning tops that shoot grenades.
Whereas these are the extra distinctive encounters, on a room by room foundation, you get fairly repetitive enemy fodder. The enemies do have some variation, however you see a variety of repeats in a short time. The rooms themselves do present some attention-grabbing terrain, although, with conveyor belts, regenerating bombs and traps that may harm everybody universally. These add wrinkle contemplating the enemy encounters stay rote and uninspired. Often, the room purpose shifts away from killing each enemy to kill extra earlier than an AI rival robotic does, or cease an enemy from stealing all of the treasure chests, however these duties are few and much between. There wanted to be a bit extra executed with these different room objectives.
By your exploration and defeating enemies you’ll unlock upgrades and equipment to swap into your robotic. Additionally, you will discover retailers to buy these as properly. Issues like secondary weapons, sprint boosts, turrets, homing weaponry, and tools are all on the desk right here. Tools might be slotted into your head, torso, and legs, which permit for shorter cooldowns, faster actions, and all kinds of changes. What I favored greatest about these is how they modified the look of your robotic in addition to how a lot enjoyable it was to combine and match to attempt a brand new construct. There are additionally talent timber that help you unlock perks, however oftentimes I discovered that the perks I truly needed could be midway right into a tree, so that they didn’t really feel as helpful as I’d’ve favored.
Regardless of the various methods you’ll be able to modify your model with Steel Thoughts, I usually discovered the minute-to-minute gameplay irritating. The UI parts usually made it complicated to equip or unequip gear, or select on the talent tree. Particularly because of the controls, the button mappings weren’t as one-to-one as I would favor, and I discovered myself usually combating towards them. Even right down to the alternatives on the menu, generally they had been D-pad solely, whereas others had been solely on the joysticks. It was complicated and infrequently led to me eradicating objects or alternatives accidently.
The UI points withstanding, Steel Thoughts remains to be a reliable roguelike that gives easy, enjoyable capturing, however that’s type of it. The motion doesn’t fluctuate sufficient to maintain gamers engaged, there’s nearly no story to talk of, and since you’ll be able to’t replenish your well being (solely your armor), you’ll be able to see a run being doomed primarily based on one dangerous room. I discovered myself actively discouraged to proceed on and push for a boss and as a substitute restarting the run solely. That’s not feeling. In an area the place there’s video games like Hades and even classics like Enter the Gungeon, I can solely advocate Steel Thoughts as a finances intro for individuals who need to poke on the style and never dive in head first. Steel Thoughts is perhaps higher for gamers new to the style, however the roguelike lovers will possible want to search out their enjoyable elsewhere.
