Shotgun King: the Final Checkmate Review (Waddle Dude)
I love this game, and strongly recommend it, but I'm going to use this review to give feedback on its various flaws.
1. On later difficulties, RNG becomes a HUGE issue. Enemy placement is random, their starting move speed progress is random, your bullet spread is random, cards are random, and the broken grenade toss is random.
Bullet spread is the worst of these, the game itself doesn't even understand it most of the time, and what should be gauranteed kills can completely whiff. Shields are meant to protect you from making bad moves, but if you shoot a bishop that's threatening you at point blank, there's a random chance they'll only take 2 damage and kill you with no shields spent. Meanwhile I'll burn through shields aiming at a threatening knight because, in reality, there's only a slim chance it won't take the 3 damage and die. It's also just frustrating to shoot at someone two spaces away and watch 3 bullets go around them, screwing your run. I suggest bullet spread, as implemented, gets ditched entirely. It should be a hitscan arc which gaurantees consistent damage distribution. If a piece takes up 90% of that arc, is should probably take all the damage, and if under 25% of the arc, 1/4 of the damage.
-Cards being as random as they are is also a crap shoot. Bad runs shouldn't exist, they waste time, and some card draws are clearly just bad. It may be rogue-like convention, but you don't have to follow rogue-like design to the letter.
-The game has a very strong strategic foundation, so strong it really doesn't need RNG to "spice it up", so instead your good plays can be tainted by bad dice rolls.
2. Difficulty levels are also handled poorly. One of the most interesting mechanics in the game is the soul card, and on higher difficulties you start with 0 with only a tiny chance of finding a black card per floor that gives you a soul slot. I have spent most of the game unable to use soul cards. This is bad.
-Limiting the player to one shot in the chamber is also just frustrating. This is more of a game feel argument, but shooting feels good, you shouldn't lower the frequency of something that feels good. The right mix of interesting moves like wands, grenades, and soul cards can dampen the down time between shots, but those all require lucky black card draws. A player's most played floor will be floor one, so you have to think about how to make that floor as fun as possible.
-In both cases, you're limiting the player's options, rather than simply scaling the challenge up to emphasize those options. If you went through normal and hard not really using soul cards, because you're not using all of your tools, you wouldn't even notice they're gone. And with one less shot in the chamber, consecutive feel-good actions are impossible from the start. My suggestion: Keep soul cards and two chambers, just throw a Queen in from the start on King difficulty.
I'm saying all this because I found the game very fun for my first entire day of play, but now it's just frustrating. I've gotten floor 11 on King and, of course, died to a bad RNG shot doing 2 damage from 2 spaces away. If I was the type to stick it out, I'd probably just stop playing entirely.