Dust & Neon Review (Fry1208)
Likes: Cool Art style. First 90 minutes of missions were enjoyable. I would have been happy to pay $5 this game, but no more than that.
Dislikes: Replay loop is too limited, with only a few variations on missions that stop feeling fresh after the first hour. The duck--and-cover based combat system is clunky and has a low skill cap. Weapon variety is severely limited and there's no real strategy for choosing which new weapon to pick up beyond checking the damage and ammo capacity. Manually reloading each bullet sounds like a interesting idea until press "R" hundreds of times in a single mission. Leveling system is underwhelming, with the improvements too marginal to really notice. The cash system feels pointless, especially because the guns and items in shops are rarely useful unless you are just buying back the items you lost in a previous run. That said, I never had that issue, because there were always enough health drops and the combat system was too straight forward. Becoming bored or impatient is the real enemy here, and is the only reason I died. The only way to make the game feel difficult was to be overly aggressive.
The most disappointing aspect of the experience was that the game didn't really even feel like a Roguelite due to the lack of variety, low difficulty, and absence of real risk/reward. I will keep an eye out for future gameplay updates, but the last two patches were underwhelming and do not give me much hope. I imagine it would take a total rework of most game systems, for me to want to play. And I realize that I'm basically saying it would need to be a different game altogether which is not not really fair of me, but I guess it speaks to my disappointment regarding how much it cost vs. how much fun I had.