Dust & Neon Reviews

pretty fun bit repetitive yeehaw buy it on sale

Having to reload EVERY SINGLE BULLET instead of a whole clip is just stupid... Even more dumb considering some weapons only hold 2 to 3 rounds at any given time.

Feels like a school project. Graphics and sound are fine. But there is no story, the goals are very repetitive, difficulty of fights feels strange, enemies are dumb, premium weapons are random (not a problem, but when ever unlocked a a chest/room by paying with cores, I always got a lot worse weapons than I've already had - this mechanism is plainly useless), buy-back of weapons is not activated before the first boss but when it kills you, you loose your weapons and usually get way worse ones (in other words another mechanism that does not work, at least for me). I got the game with a big discount but I do not think I'll ever play it again. And I regret I paid even the discounted price, to be honest.

I really liked this game right up until the last boss which I can not beat for some reason. I can beat every level on hard and beat all of the bosses 3 times. I just don't know what it is about the last boss. And saying it's a skill issue does nothing to change my mind about my enjoyment of the game. The auto-reload option was far slower than I was able to do on my own making that option useless. Auto aim didn't seem to do anything and I am 100% giving up. I am stick of having to grind levels to afford to die and buy my weapons back. But my REAL frustration comes from two things: 1. I could not find better weapons than the ones I found at the start. Every crate I found including the ones that require 10 cores to unlock were all far worse than anything I owned. Which meant progression pretty much stopped 2-3 hours into the game for my weapons. It also meant there was no real weapon variety aside from the fact that you carry 3 weapons. And it wasn't just that mine were a little bit better and that I'd have to sacrifice a little to get a little but I'd always have to sacrifice a lot to get a little which never seemed worth it. 2. The points you put into the clone-o-matic taper off after level 30. So unless you plan on a ridiculous grind, you can never unlock everything. Which makes upgrading feel unsatisfying. This might have been more of a moot point had I completed the game. The other negative reviews were right: once you played and beaten the 5-6 different types of level, it's just those again and again with the different bosses. That wasn't a deal breaker for me since I enjoyed the core gameplay but worth mentioning. The sound was thematically accurate but got a bit tired after awhile. Graphics were good. Also, sometimes the difficulty didn't feel accurately represented. The train levels even on hard were not hard. The bomb levels were hard even on medium.

I was really surprised by how good this game was. It was on sale, it looked really sharp, and someone in the reviews said it was solid on steam deck so I gave it a go. Well, I didn't put it down for 2 hours after that (which is a long session for me). Amazed that this is done by a solo developer, what a talent! I strongly suggest you pick this up while it's on sale because it's an insanely good deal. Definitely worth full price but a no-brainer on sale. Excellent twin-stick shooting action, Borderlands style loot system where you can quickly evaluate if what's dropped is an improvement. Lots of unique guns and reloading animations (love the way reloading works, by the way). Runs great on Steam Deck for sure, and cloud saving works perfectly between PC and Deck. I really appreciate that the runs are so short. One of my biggest pain points with rogue likes is that they often feel like a slog that can end in utter disappointment. When the instances are short and frequent it makes the format much more digestible.

I absolutely adore the art-style, and the game play, even though it may not be a popular game among other well known games. It is certainly a hidden gem amongst the limitless sea of games, and especially good at killing time, or you have lots of free time.

Fairly limited in variety, but carried by decent gunplay. I'd love to see a followup with more developed gameplay. Pros: - Combat is satifying. - Presentation is good, with a moody, fitting soundtrack. Cons: - Grindy. - Illusion of weapon variety, as every type more or less plays the same, effectively giving you just 3 guns the entire game.

Straight up robot gunslinger vibes through and through. Walk into a building and precisely spray lead into enemies from all 3 of your guns in 2 seconds or less. Active reload on point and sometimes takes longer than your gunfights!

Dust & Neon is an enjoyable roguelite looter-shooter with decent replayability and a pretty solid gameplay loop. It's definitely fun for an hour at a time, and the missions you take have enough variety that it won't (normally) give you only the one type to choose from. The music meshes really well into running around gunning down robots, and the enemies drop (usually) quickly enough that you feel like a mighty Western gun-slinging human-robot hybrid. Three different gun types can be carried around - revolver, shotgun, and rifle. Each generated weapon will have a variety of stats, one of which is ammo capacity. You are not able to carry more than a handful of shells at start, but this can be increased via skillpoints at level-up. The weapon appearances are pretty standard sci-fi-flavored Western weapons, with typical glowing bits and circuitry, but there's still plenty of shiny steel and chrome to go around. The randomly-generated names can be pretty atrocious, though - my shotgun's name is currently the "Phat Whomper". The loot drops I find seem to be somewhat similar to what I'm already carrying, so I haven't had any instance of being suddenly and wildly overpowered, but I've consistently remained powerful enough to make it through the level. The enemies seem stay within the same range as far as I can tell, too, so the difficulty of a hard mission is more to do with enemy count and level. The cover system is easy to grasp, though sometimes the enemy robots do have a tendency to not be able to pathfind around it while coming at you. Only real gripe about it is that controls aren't as responsive as I'd like when switching between running toward cover, rolling behind cover, and then ducking INTO cover. There's a bit of roll, stand there, press button. Otherwise it's pretty intuitive. There are unlockables like a good roguelite, though there may be a bit more grind involved than other games in the genre - one of the upgrades available for me to buy in-game is 1,000 bits. I come back from a mission with about 30-50. Some of the skills you grab for your character when leveling up don't seem incremental enough to be worth it. 1% extra crit chance, or 2HP, aren't going to be as useful in the longrun as being able to carry more rifle rounds. But to each their own. All in all I think this is a solid effort. For $20 I'd be a little disappointed in the amount of content, but not terribly so. For a 50% sale, the game is amazing for the price.

Amazing top down shooter. Art style reminds me of Borderlands. Not too difficult and really fun. Recommended 10/10