Shape Shifter: Formations Reviews

fun and engaging

Hard but fun.

Fun interactive game with many unlocks and farming

This is a difficult one and I wish there was a neutral option. I am choosing to downvote for now because this game has fascinating build potential but far too much RNG as you unlock more upgrades. Many of the early upgrades are boring but useful, while most of the later ones are very fun and can even be build defining--if you ever get them. There's a lot of times you can end up rolling tons of upgrades that ONLY work if you first have a way to apply X status or trigger Y effect, but you might just never get offered a good way to trigger/apply said effects reliably (or occasionally, you won't get offered them at all). At higher difficulties, the game just becomes grinding for infinite stat points rather than strategy, and I've personally only been able to get through with retaliation/healing/ice builds, assuming I'm offered sufficient healing to do so. Some of the later weapons are quite interesting and mix it up, like the lightning 'hammer' one (AoE slow firing cone that first shorter>medium>longer>shorter>medium>longer attacks in that order and does very high damage) or the cryo beam (perfect accuracy laser that applies cold). However, many of the weapons can simply become rather useless and almost unimportant to your build without having much way to improve them because again, the upgrade selection is so RNG heavy. Even with 5 rerolls, 5 bans, 5 locks, 5 alters, 1 dual pick, and potentially a small number of additional bits of those added later, the upgrades are just BLOATED. To make things worse, several upgrades suck unless you stack them, requiring even more build focus to get any value out of them! My most successful strategies tend to be just throwing everything possible at the wall, but that invalidates mods you get like Singularity where you do more damage against targets with only one status on them, meaning you still have bloat. I want to keep unlocking things, but I also don't, because it'll make it even harder to get the things I may need. For a game with so much interesting build potential, this is a disappointment. Hopefully they update it with even more control over your upgrade deck--it'd become more tactical and less luck based then. Additionally, the game starts off SLOW right now, which may harm player retention and interest early on--speeding up some of the early levels or just flat out making players start with certain meta upgrades would be a good move. Overall, I'm hopeful for this game, but struggle to recommend it just yet. Still, this is closer to a neutral, and is more just hoping that the devs better tread the fine line between player control and randomness. I'll probably still play it, but it's just so frustrating to go multiple runs without being able to make entire swaths of upgrade combinations work.

Very underrated. At least A tier survivor shooter for me. The meta progression is real nice and addicting af

A very fun game with alot of replayability!