izigame.me

Star of Providence could have been a great roguelike—if it hadn’t come out after both The Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon. For its price range, it falls short in terms of content. Even with the latest update, which integrates a previously paid DLC into the base game, it still feels lacking.
While it's a solid first attempt, it needs constructive criticism—because nothing improves with just praise. Unfortunately, the waves of Dunkey fans aren’t exactly offering much in that department (go ahead, shower me in clown).

Variety

The biggest issue is how little variation there is between runs. Instead of making meaningful choices that define a build, it feels like you’re just picking different-colored M&Ms from whatever RNG throws at you. Mainly a run is made of Weapon, perks and cartridges, health/damage upgrades.
Shooting & Weapon System
Each run starts with the base starship gun. Throughout levels, you’ll find "chests" that offer a choice between two weapons. Guns are formed by combining an archetype with keywords that should make them unique. However, they often don’t. On top of that, each gun has a limited ammo pool—once depleted, you’re forced back to the base weapon. This leads to three main problems:
1) Archetypes are bland. Most are generic (laser, revolver, charge shot, faster fire rate), and the few interesting ones are locked behind a hefty in-game currency price. This is a baffling decision given how small the weapon pool is—these should be the first and cheapest unlocks. Probably they aren't because the rest of the unlocks aren’t that great either.
2) Keywords are underwhelming. A handful genuinely change how a weapon behaves (triple shot, homing, hitscan), but the majority are just minor stat tweaks or trade-offs so insignificant that you barely notice them or worse just add damage towards a type of enemy, a thing you have no control over. Also the keywords are randomly assigned where you find a gun, and at best you can add new ones with costly items from shop rooms, obviously the choise is rng as well.
3) The ammo system is bad. I hated it in Enter the Gungeon, and it’s even worse here with only one gun at a time. You can’t temporarily switch to your base weapon, so you’re forced to burn through ammo on regular enemies, making it feel like a waste. This also means that finding a weapon early in the run feels pointless—you’ll just be tossing it away once the ammo runs out. The whole system boils down to RNG: just survive until the final floors and hope you get a good weapon when it actually matters.
The DLC introduced 40 new weapons—mostly gimmicky variations that do change how encounters play out. Not always in a positive way, but at least they add variety. Unfortunately, they’re rare and suffer from the same ammo problem, making them feel wasteful to use on weaker enemies. The exception is cursed weapons, which provide both a bonus and a drawback but are infinite until they self-destruct preventing you from swapping weapons, making them a mixed bag, still there is some good idea there.
I'd rather the weapon system be something you build during a run, perhaps you collect keywords to keep and choose 2 archetypes that mix, so like a sword that shoots laser, just to feel like the choice of guns during the first floor is actually something you build upon to make the run a succesfull one, not only tied to RNG.
Perks and Cartridges and Blessings
Each level you can find at least one upgrade room, offering a choice of 1 among 3 perk to choose from. In theory, this should feel like a meaningful build/run choice, instead, some perks feel like basic mechanics that were removed just to make the game harder. Many of them resemble things that would be permanent unlocks in other roguelikes, making the choice feel forced—you’d be foolish not to take them. If those were added as unlocks the remaining one wouldn't be run changing, but would pose an actual choice, that might vary depending on the success of the run so far. Unfortunately a couple are just too situational and the player doesn't have the build building tools to make them work.
Cartridges are a DLC addition, essentially Isaac-style trinkets only you can collect a bunch of them. Unfortunately their effect are so situational that they rarely feel impactful. Most of the time they’re just an “I guess that’s cool” kind of unlock. That said, some dropped ones are actually useful. EDIT:
The only meaty ones are the Blessing, they are few, you get a choice of 2, unfortunately them even appearing is completely RNG.
Health and Damage
Not many problem on this part, I might not like 100% how RNG the upgrades are but I feel it's a reasonably thought out system. Perhaps what the game is lacking is healing items. There is an health upgrade system, where once you find 4 health fragments your health get upped by one, perhaps that could be a reward for a clearing a room without damage?

Other and ending

The rest of the game presents well, the enemies are well designe, good pixel art, the bestiary has fun comments and a bit of lore sprinkled in. The Bullet hell is quite hellish EDIT:, still don't undertand why the dash doesn't have invulnerability, makes it useless and actually damaging during bosses. The Soundtrack is just bleeps and bloops, nothing you haven't heard, very generic and frankly quite noisy by default, turn it down.
Obviously I'm going to receive a lot of "you haven't played it enough" and I know there are some unlocks I haven't experienced but I ask you, is this a "It gets better after 12 hours" type of game? Runs already feel very repetitive, I've beaten Overlord once, nothing really changed, don't think hard mode is going to make it any better. It definitely needs variety to hold your attention while you go on unlocking the very few thing you can, can't expect people to work to reach the bare minimum of fun...Probably going to slowly finish it, got it after all, but it's definitely a "one run in a while" game.
EDIT: REMOVE THE FISH!!!