NecroBouncer Reviews

It's a perfectionistic game. You have to be extremely fast on your reactions, you have to remember where the projectiles are, you have to keep track of EVERYTHING while also trying to remember what enemies do, how they work, where they're casting, what they're casting, where you are, where you're going to dodge, then of course comes the randomness in some of the abilities, and some of the screwing that'll happen just because everything's in the right position, or is literally flooding the screen with enemies, healthbars, attacks, and you. It's goddamned overwhelming. (This mostly happens after the 1st floor, but can sometimes happen in Shrine rooms on the first floor.) Certain things seem intended to tick the player off, too, like the pillars. They'll get stuck on walls frequently, and you'll never be able to get them all into place before the timer goes off. The same could be said for the Crystal rooms. Relic Rooms are THE WORST. Imagine the worst traps with perfect yet desynced timing, and you have the rooms you need to get through. The worst thing, though, is the room clutter and spike traps. As if keeping track of everything happening onscreen wasn't enough, you have to keep track of slightly different grey tiles that can damage you while you're trying to artfully combo a bunch of enemies, and the clutter just makes getting around and actually landing or positioning right a nightmare. Then we have the relics. Oh boy. Only slightly better than Issac if you know what I mean. You get to choose 1 of three, but one might be corrupted, though your hand WILL sometimes be forced to choose the corrupted one due to how... Either self-debuffing or just plain stupid some of the relics are, like all the ones that add # of clutter clutter based on _ when clutter is already an annoyance. Yes, there are sets of relics that would act like builds.... IF they ever came up in the right order, and, oh hey, look at that. Relic pool bloating going up per run, too, making that impossible when randomness is in play. Ugh. Then we have the standard moveset. The melee can DELAY, NOT RESET enemy actions, so, if you were unlucky enough to have something charging a moment before you hit them, you're going to get hit in the next milisecond. The ranged is actually what SHOULD have been the main attack, but no. It's a piercing wave projectile that takes a limited energy meter to cast. The same one that you do your far more powerful abilities with (zap bouncer does far more damage than 3 waves, but they cost the same amount of energy). Then we have the map. Yeah. Map. Mhm. Totally have a choice here guys. Totally not just going to go for all the relics because they do important things sometimes, if the right ones come up. Nope. Was the room choosing totally pointless? Yes, except when you want to avoid Relic Hunts. Last gripe is that the game seems like it fights itself on whether to give the player XP or not. Remember those pillars and crystals? The way they work seems to force enemy spawns, yet.... The point of the room is to stop them from spawning, but, you want them to spawn so you can level, but then leveling is capped to once a room, and there's a downside of Zombies spawning out of corpses if you linger too long, as well as a level cap that you WILL hit in zone 1... I definitely do NOT recommend this game to anyone else.

interesting and cool concept but it really lacks polish and has a long way to go. i'd wait until it is updated more as it has a lot of potential, but at the moment i wouldn't recommend it.

This game has some great pieces in it, the passive buffs and debuffs, a FTL-style map path, and it's obviously made by someone who really enjoys the rogue genre... but the game lacks polish and feels unfinished. It feels like the developer really wanted to develop a few key mechanics and for everything else in the game said "meh, that's good enough".

NecroBouncer was just what I needed this holiday season! It's good-looking, well made, fun and challenging. It has a nice learning curve, doesn't throw too much your way at once, but keeps getting more and more engaging and complex as you play. Wrapping my head around all the potential synergies is just starting to get really fun. This game will challenge even the best action platformers with its movement. Art is beautiful and music gets me hyped and bopping my head every time. Even though it's a dungeon-crawler at its core, I find the concept original and cute. There's some polish I'd like to see in the future (for example it bugs me I can get hurt by traps or trigger abilities after completing the level), but I'm looking forward to playing more and it was definitely worth the money, highly recommend!

Greetings all! NecroBouncer is finally out in full release. I checked out the prologue a month or two ago and was dragged out for a while, now the full game is out and you don't have to worry about having a small chunk of the game. Have a great run everyone!!!

Too bad, there's a lot of good stuff here that could make a great game. But the combat feels very annoying and boring, your weapon is weak, there's no variety (at least in the beginning), the enemies are too tanky for no reason, the different rooms types change nothing about the combat, and the upgrades are boring and don't have enough impact.

Had a game-breaking bug that wouldn't go away for a couple of days, but its gone now and has most likely been fixed. The dev messaged me about it and clearly cares about the game. That alone is enough reason for me to recommend it!

I would not recommend this, even on sale, unfortunately. Gameplay loop is basic, does not feel rewarding, skills are underwhelming. Progression is .. there, but after a couple of runs I didn't feel like I was progressing. Character felt just as meh as it did on my first run.

It is a fun if not chaotic game with the first floor being just the right amount of difficult, the second floor is absolute insanity (even with all the stuff that lowers difficulty) and almost all of the difficulty on this floor comes from the special big knights that shoot massive projectiles in 8 directions, and they run away from you like a scared child so you have to catch them, and the second boss is fairly fine except after you defeat it it goes bullet hell mode for a few seconds, I can't really talk about the third floor because I only got there once and died in the third room, but the sondtrack slaps 9/10, EDIT: boys I did it, I beat the third boss, and there's a fourth floor which is hands down the most insane floor so far. EDIT 2: I did it, I beat the fourth and final boss and I can say he is the hardest, most bullet-hell boss in the game (he has two phases, in the second phase hit his bullet(s) back at him to damage him)

Reviewer's context: I play way, way too many roguelikes/lites. Got a taste for it with ADOM and Brogue, moved onto BoI, Spelunky, Enter the Gungeon, and many, many more. Most played game by hours is currently Slay the Spire, followed by Binding of Issac and Deep Rock Galactic. At the very baseline, NecroBouncer does what it says on the tin; it is a twin-stick arena fighting game, with passive items, active abilities, and roguelite progression. And if that's enough for you, then this will serve. But I think the devs could do more. Primary of my complaints: there's an opening cutscene about how the bartender wants you as a...whatever you are, to go bounce for them for their bar. And instead of taking the time to try to build upon that world at all, you may as well have slept through it for all it matters. There's this thinking that the gameplay loop makes the game, but it's only one pillar of the gameplay experience. I purposefully bought this game thinking that there would be a world to explore, parts of the "bar" that would be interesting to learn about/uncover. None of that actually matters, as it turns out. The only time you see the "bar" is when you encounter it as a shop, and otherwise it is as generic of a melee-focused top-down arena fighter as you get. The rest are polish/game-feel issues: - The concept of hit-stop is fully non-existent, your attacks are just an animation that passes through everything, making anything that took damage blink once. No good audio cues, no hit-stop animation. - The player's hurtbox is too pixel-exact, and doesn't account for the fact that the players are humans, and thus think in a 3d mindset; the very top of the player character's head, and a fair portion of the upper body do count as part of the hurtbox, which strikes me as a little illogical, given that we move around in 3d. - Bosses are rather dull, due to the "fully invincible except for certain parts of the fight" mechanic that doesn't really make any sense. The first few times to learn the pattern, and then since you can't do anything else _but_ dodge, it loses my interest immediately. - Movement is a bit too stilted for a melee-based arena fighter, and dodge rolling, while helpful, feels imprecise; I could not tell you where I was going to land once I started, which clashes a little with the "relic hunt" arena - The AI really stupidly just stands there, once spawned; if the response to this is that the enemy are drunks that need to be ousted, a) then animate them as such please, and b) once they are aggro'd, they should present some kind of consistent threat. Having them suddenly stop chasing the player removes me from the moment very quickly. If this is artificial easing of the fight, it feels bad and needs to be re-considered. - That there were only three possible starting archetypes felt really, really bad; the fact that you could only start with one kind of body with its one ability really turned me off. I understand that you needed it that way to center level up upgrades on, but with basically no choice, it felt really bad. - Finally, the least of these issues, once you've completed your objective, the room exit immediately opens up, and if you were standing on the exit, say goodbye to anything you hadn't picked up yet in that room, as you're off to the next one. No choice to delay moving on. To be fair, this isn't a 0/10 review: - The game turns on and off with ease, and doesn't take up a lot of disk space for what it does, and it appears to be not buggy at all, which is nice - The abilities are interesting to play with, once you can get them - The metacurrency concept of achieving certain goals before acquiring a piece of metacurrency feels better than "just grind the game's deaths until you win". This forces the player to learn the mechanics, and allows for a sense of accomplishment. - The pathing tree and legend are very neat, clear, and easy to understand. No scrolling necessary, it feels really good to use. Ultimately, as it is, unless the devs really re-work this game, it just feels like yet another middling game to throw onto the heaping pile of top-down arena shooter/fighter roguelites that are currently flooding this market. You have to do something really meaningful to stand out, and not having any real NPC interaction at all puts a big damper on it for me. As it stands, I will be submitting for a refund shortly after this review posts.