Shotgun King: the Final Checkmate Review (Armagedon)
I've had quite the run with Shotgun King. It's really casual-friendly, fun and also has mod support, which is always welcome. If you're a completionist, I'd stay away though.
"About this game" section describes the gameplay well. In addition to that, there are some fun mechanics for the player to discover and use for their advantage. Aside from shooting, you can also kill pieces by using a blade or pushing them off the board. Dificulty-wise, it can be both challenging and casual-friendly depending on the rank you choose to play. The runs tend to be pretty short depending on how fast you think and strategise but the game can still entertain the player for hours on end.
As for the artistic aspects, I like the 8-bit aesthetic of Black and white with their shades and occasional red. It's really well made. The boss music also tends to go pretty hard.
Shotgun King is a great game but in my eyes, it has one, massive thorn that can hinder the experience and it lies in its achievements.
You may be wondering why did I say that completionists should stay away. Well, it's because a good portion of the achievements are unfun and RNG dependent. The worst offenders being "Win with ..." achievements. It basically means you have to complete the main game mode while having 3 cards specified in a given achievement by the end of the run. With the amount of cards in the game and player being given an option to choose between two random cards only 10 times before the final boss, you can start to see the issue and it only gets worse when you look deeper into it. Some achievements may actually need 5 cards because there's a few of them that can't spawn until the player picks up other specific cards. There are also specific requirements that aren't mentioned in the codes like some cards needing minimum 1 or 2 specific chess figures. The devs added an ability to reroll given options and two cards that give the player ability to pick any selected card whose spawn conditions are met for black and white side respectively but they still remain a chore. You can still go 2 hours without getting an achievement build even when running with rerolls from first floor onward. There are also vauge achievements like "defeat a Black Bishop" or "Defeat the Blight", which don't even have in-game hints that'd guide the player on how to even get to these enemies.
Luckily the devs have made a survey in January and are collecting feedback from the community, so maybe those issues will be addressed in the next update, if and whenever it comes.
Overall Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is a great game but getting 100% achievements is a tall task requiring a lot of patience and luck.