izigame.me

Nightmare Reaper is a game that really feels like it's chasing its tail, as well as another example of why Steam should have review options other than do recommend or don't. It is game game full of good ideas, but the experience of playing it feels like those ideas are loosely tied together with string as opposed to forming a cohesive whole. What I mean by this is that, while individual mechanics are well executed, they rarely enhance each other when they come into contact and, in fact, often wind up detracting from one another instead.
Here's a couple examples:
There's a whole Hexen-esque array of cool melee weapons, each with a special alt-fire attack!...but the game quickly introduces enemies that explode on death and has to account for the possibility that you could have any combination of weapon types, which it does by giving you so much ammo of all types that running out is never a risk, making the melee weapons less than useless.
You get a grappling hook about a third into the game that gives you more movement options!...but most arenas are pretty flat boxes, so you don't really need it outside of a few specific instances. Plus, you already have a dash that makes you invincible when you use it and is way easier to control, so why even bother?
You get to play a fast-paced boomer-shooter!...but, due to being a rouge-lite, the levels are procedurally generated, so it lacks the clever enemy placement and unique layout that are some of the main appeals of the genre.
Some of this might be more forgivable if the game were at least a reasonably tight experience, but the time it takes to get through is staggering, around twenty hours to the final boss, without much to show in the meantime. After the grappling hook, nothing about the game-play loop meaningfully changes, which means that the last two-thirds of the game are spent retreading the same ground over and over. Even the bosses are just regular enemy types with more health and a big red bar above them. Other than that, only one of the game's three skill trees gives you any new combat options, but they're doled out so agonizingly slow that by the time you get them you're not thinking "Wow! A cool new ability!" and instead thinking "Where was that ten hours ago when the game was getting stale?" And when you do go to buy new abilities, you have to play a little mini-game every time before they unlock, which makes the experience of powering up much more tedious and dampens the good feeling you get from finally being able to afford something you were waiting for.
The mini-games themselves are, like many things in Nightmare Reaper, not bad, but superfluous, another thing that was put into the game just because and adds nothing to the rest of the experience, existing in its own little world. Honestly, if a sequel is ever made, the main thing I'd want out of it would be less content, with a greater focus on making the few interesting bits better, as it felt like this game was more fat than meat.
All in, Nightmare Reaper is a game with a ton of cool ideas that come together to form something that is less than the sum of its parts. Nothing that stands out among the glut of FPS revival games, but nothing that bad either. I'd give it a 6/10, but the same game cut down to a third of the length could have easily been a 7 or an 8, which just adds to the frustration it gives me.