Heavy Storm Shadow Steam Charts & Stats

Cheap enough thrill that's definitely one of the weaker titles in the genre. Heavy Storm Shadow is a pretty shallow game hiding under some bland fanservice. Better games (and fanservice if you're so inclined) out there for a similar price or cheaper. That said, I did end up playing it past the refund window. Feels like there's not much build diversity but at the same time there's not enough banishes. A lot of skill sets have dead/weak skills that you can't selectively banish so it sucks to be offered the one you don't want. Only a few chips seem useful, ended up using the same two after unlocking them. Pilots take way too long to level up, I finished every stage on max difficulty before I raised a single pilot to level 5. Still, maybe it'll improve and in future this review will be proven wrong. Until then I can't really recommend this.

For the price, this game's not bad and definitely scratches the itch fairly well. There's not a lot of content present as far as I can tell, and the English translation is just terrible. I thought I was going to put it down after my first few runs, but once you start actually getting decent builds and clearing levels and unlocking some upgrades, I started having some real fun with it. Starts slow (as is often the case with games in this genre) but if you stick with it for five or six runs it starts becoming a reliable way to have a few minutes of fun at a time. Note: I say there's not a lot of content, but even after just a couple days the devs have already made a bunch of changes based on player feedback and their roadmap seems to include some more content and characters (I think) in the pipeline soon enough, so I'd definitely award points for both of those.

The game is a decent survivors-like clone, somewhat similar to 20MTD. But I must warn - optimisation is BAD. If at first it runs pretty smootly, 10 minutes into one run and stable 14-10 fps at best (if you not playing with difficulty boosters).

It's like if Vampire Survivors and Crimson Lands had a kid. There are not as many weapons and character (armor) unlocks as VS.

I am having a lot of fun with this game so far. But it doesn't feel polished - graphics feel blurry - same monsters over and over again ( no big variety in it after some playtime ) - the levels are basically all the same design This seems to be more negative than positive but the fact that I am having fun and still play it, I am giving it a thumbs up.

Went in with little expectations but pretty excited, but something just felt off right from the start. Meta progression is really dull. There's a ton of different passive buffs you can unlock, but the issue is it felt like most of them were just "When energy is drained x happens". Or there would be a give and take like more damage at the cost of most of your max health bar. I looked at every single one, and only a couple seemed actually worthwhile. To top that off, you're also limited to 5 at a time which is whatever, but on top of that, every one of these upgrades also has a cost to equip, and you're limited to 10. So you won't even be using 5 at once anyways unless you take basic ones. More on meta progression, you can unlock a few other starting guns. You start with a machine gun that does decent damage, has a fairly sized magazine and not terrible reload speed. But every other gun you can unlock is just a different rifle, and the damage increase is not very big, but the magazine just gets smaller and smaller. Not only that, but if you thought the reload speed for the starting gun was slow (Which imo it is, especially for a game like this) the other guns are even slower. You get 2 characters to start that have a different skill, and they both have some passives you can unlock by levelling them up. As of right now, the only way to unlock the other characters is just by winning a run. There isn't any kind of side objectives or anything. It also felt like I had seen every possible upgrade there was in my first run. Most of them were neat, and they all come with mini skill trees to upgrade them. But that brings me to another gripe. You can't choose what upgrade to get. And not only that but I had it happen on multiple occasions where the same skill took up 2 reward slots on levelling up, just with a different passive from their tree. That just felt like such a waste when you could have just let me pick the passive I wanted, and given me another skill reward instead. So I would not recommend this game right now. Keep an eye on it and wait for more content to see if its worth it. Hopefully they improve progression as well. But right now there's just too many better options that are also cheaper.

Globally and overall, the game represents a typical bullethell genre. But with some nuances: - Character variation is useless. The benefits of special abilities are almost negligible overall. - The balance of abilities during level-ups has a very wide range, which boils down to the fact that any difficulty can be overcome using the same combination of abilities, while the rest are frankly weak. - Perks seem as though only a couple were well thought out, and the rest were quickly made up on the spot just to increase the quantity. They don’t offer anything of value. On the plus side, it has nice graphics and visual effects. For me, the game is definitely not worth its money compared to other competitors.

Pros - Feels good to play right from the outset (probably the most important thing) - Each character having a unique ability and set of buffs increases gameplay variety - Lots of meta progression and ways to make the game even harder if you feel like it - Presentation is solid - UI makes sense, decently translated - Graphics are serviceable, though Unity starts to cry as enemy density peaks and drops frames. - It's cheap, you aren't losing much by trying it. The price feels about right for a fun timewaster. Cons - The maps are just recolours of one another with slightly different enemy sets. - Sound design is poor, with gun sounds that lack impact/bass and certain ones not being tuned to your audio settings. - Soundtrack is frankly terrible with the same bad loop of some random rock track taken from a royalty free website on each map. I would strongly urge the devs to rectify these sound choices. Something electronic or faster paced would work wonders.

I already spent a few hours on the prologue so i was expecting something nice from the final product. Let's just say as of right now the game is barely worth its price, it lacks content, i also encountered a pretty much game breaking bug and no answers from dev so far. In terms on content, there isn't a lot to do, but it's ok since it's not why we like that kind of games, the thing however is that there is hardly any progression outside of runs, most of the modules are questionable, it's hard to make a build if you don't enjoy the boost or depleting energy mechanics since they are mainly based around these. The skills you can unlock during the runs are great on a whole, but it's just waaaay too rng based, and there are no ways to ban, so often you just fail the run because you can't get what you are looking for and instead just get some bad skills. If i had to compare it to another game, it would be a 3D version of 20 minutes till dawn but worst, i wouldn't recommend right now, so unless you are a big mecha fan, better stick to the prologue since you're not missing much anyways. Now here comes the main problem, the game was just release so i'm fine with leaving it some time to fix the problems and improve, the thing is there is basically no communication between the dev(s) and the players, indeed it's impossible to contact the devs on discord as they do not reply (discord that is also currently of a very questionable quality). All in all, i'm hoping this game gets updated at some point since i believe it has some potential to be really good, and dev, pleeeeease talk to your players, games are meant for the players you can't just ignore them. TL:DR : Stick to the prologue don't buy the game for now and wait and see for it to get updated before making a choice.

Music is shit, combat is lit. Really wish there was an actual auto aim function. Also some upgrades feel like they don't work sometimes. Either that or I don't notice them as much. Still fun to play with. Once you get the third mech, you'll really start to enjoy the game. First mech is okay, second mech is meh. Only thing I don't like is that I'm not sure if the developer responds to things. It's okay as is, but I would rather have some fixes once I sink my teeth into the game some more and figure out which things don't work. Also for reference, don't take the bottom tree of the -20% reduced damage talent. The AoE is either so pitifully small I can't see it or it does nothing. Not that I imagine you would, since pure damage is king. Also, take anything regarding reload speed. You'll thank me later. (The reload speed tree eventually lets you never reload again with dodging, and that's a cornerstone of a build currently.)