izigame.me

This looked like a really cool game when I first saw it. I love boss rush games like titan souls, and the 1 button twists on games like Rhythm Doctor or Rhythm Heaven made me think this would be similar. After beating the campaign in under 3 hours, while getting top times on most of the levels, I found that ONE BTN BOSSES is an unpolished, unplaytested, poorly designed game, that rides on an enticing premise.
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Good stuff:
-The premise is great. There's a lot you can do with this one button, on-rail movement type of stuff.
-The shooting mechanics based off of speed are great too. Creates that nice depth with a balance between dodging and DPS.
-I found the dialogue funny at times, and the office premise surprised me.
-The build mechanics are cool. You get a module for movement, damage, and a supporting one, and there's potential for cool synergies between all of these. There's also room for building around bosses, using certain movement and damage abilities that work well with the bosses attacks. Unfortunately, despite all the potential here, I rarely found moments where I had to swap my build to counter a boss, and there is one build that 200% outperforms any other build.
-I like that the game focuses on time to defeat a boss, rather than just defeating the boss. This gives room for casual and hardcore players.
-I couldn't find any bugs related to gameplay. I only found one minor UI bug that doesn't impact the game experience.
That's really all the good stuff I could find.
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Bad stuff:
-There is a huge lack of polish and content throughout the whole game. This will be expanded on in the rest of the review, but also this is the 1.0 release, and there is a feedback google form in the pause screen. I understand the desire for feedback, but just plug socials or a discord, or be in early access. A google form in your *pause* menu is embarrassing.
-Despite being a boss rush game, there is only 5 unique bosses. Now, each of these bosses do have multiple encounters and if you consider all of that it's probably around 30-40 bosses. But most of the encounters on the same boss are the same attack styles over and over. Many of the attacks are uninteresting, and they will mix and match attacks together only to create walls and poorly telegraphed messes. Despite the on-rail restrictiveness of the movement, it's clear the devs did not think about how the player is supposed to dodge some of these attacks, and instead just put stuff they thought was kinda cool.
Compare this to other boss rush games like Titan Souls or Rabbit And Steel, which have many more boss designs, with varied unique attack patterns, that are all well telegraphed, and there is thought put into what the player is supposed to do. If there was more thought put into these attack patterns, with a clear goal in mind of how each attack/phase in a boss is supposed to challenge the player, this could be really really fun. But instead it feels random, like not even unfair random, it just feels like spam. If they went with a more reactive approach with boss design, rather than set pattern attacks for each boss, that would service the movement mechanics much better.
-There are these HR fights before each boss that teach you the attacks of the boss. This seems like a cool idea, it lessens any BS of "wtf is going on." But there are already infinite fast retries with no consequences, so you could just play the boss once or twice and get the gist of the attacks. And the learning phase of a boss is one of the most fun parts of bossfight games.
The learning is part of why soulslike games, Hollow Knight, shmups, are so fun and exhilarating. You get to the hard part, freak out and go "wtf is going on" and die, and then you slowly learn the patterns and realize that everything is actually pretty simple. In ONE BTN BOSSES, you don't get any of that learning experience, and rather you just memorize un-telegraphed patterns and it's just tedious.
-There is a lack of QOL throughout the game. There are some obvious changes that should be there but aren't: there's no "fully charged" indicator for the reverse module, there's no way to change your build in the pause screen, there's disappearing telegraph for the drop attacks but not for the similar bomb attacks, you can't see your time in game, you can't see the time to get certain ranks, you can't find damage numbers for your attacks, there's no additional damage stats in the roguelike pickups so you can't minmax your build, and more small things that add up and break your immersion.
-I think the art style is cool, but the way it's executed is honestly ugly. Everything looks very jagged when there are off-angled shapes: many outlines, like the arc attacks in the first level, have this problem. The victory and defeat screens look blurry. The symbols in the grind rewards don't fully fill the outline, so there's some empty pixels that look weird. When choosing your supportive item on the build select, the lines in the middle don't reach the info box and just float there. Also, every fight has the exact same background. There is absolutely no styling or other distinctions for each stage, besides the boss sprite and attack patterns.
-I saved the biggest one for the end, the worst part about this game are the modules and the builds. There are 3 movement options, 5 attack options, and 7 utility options. Here are the useless ones:
-I could not find a use for reverse movement. It's clunky and doesn't synergize with any of the attacks. You deal much more damage and have much more mobility with turn or dash.
-Pickup attack is overcomplicated and useless. It deals no damage and requires you to have perfect position to grab the pickup as much as possible, but there's always something in the way and the damage is weak. I think it's supposed to synergize with dash but for some stupid stupid reason you can't pickup the pickup while dashing???
-Juggler attack has the same problems as pickup but at least it scales.
-Shooter attack is fine but laser is a direct upgrade.
-Slower not weaker is a complete debuff and I don't even know why it exists, you don't even get a damage buff.
-Phaser is situational and underwhelming.
-Basically all utilities are weaker than thick hull and invincibl-er
The laser attack is a million times better than 3/4 of the other attacks, and then that last attack is completely busted and untested. How the reload attack is supposed to work is you click, it charges up, and then it shoots once its fully charged, or you click again to shoot it prematurely. The fully charged attack does a lot of damage, but because of how poor the boss attacks are, you can't get a full charge. So how you're actually supposed to play reload is by mashing your mouse and space bar as fast as you can, melting the bosses with a ton of small bullets with a high minimum damage. They somehow did not test this and it completely ruins the whole game if you decide to play like this. It's 30 seconds faster than any other build and when combined with thick hull or invincibl-er, it's just a button mashing simulator.
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Basically, a combination of bad boss patterns and unbalanced untested builds creates a very brainless, poorly thought out experience. Even if you play without an overpowered build, the way the bullet hells are designed makes it a frustrating memory-fest. Most of the potential in this game is squandered due to the exact wrong decisions being made. Because of how great the base concepts are, a lot of this could be fixed in patches and this could be a really great game. That's the only reason I wrote this review, because this game could be super fun if they actually paid attention to how they designed the game. So please release many many patches, and then I'll recommend this game.