With some patience to get through its initial hurdle of difficulty and generally punishing nature, this hardcore twin-stick shooter eventually reveals itself to be one of the more fun games of 2025. It blends a range of influences together with ideas of its own into an exciting new thing, with Geometry Wars as a strong gameplay and visual foundation, a strategically interesting upgrade system pulled right from Gradius, and a perk system reminiscent of roguelikes. There are a bunch of scoring-based arcade modes with modifiers and such, but the star of the show is the 30-40 minute campaign mode, which takes place on a play area that regularly changes shape and will mercilessly end your run if you don't get into the new shape before it changes. This campaign is broken into five stages of different shapes, enemy waves, and boss fights chosen at random from set pools, which combined with the upgrade/perk stuff makes the game feel really varied between runs even if it all kinda looks samey.
Even with my prior familiarity with the game's key ingredients, my first few sessions with it were not quite clicking. The first stage was a real wall, initially feeling overtuned even on the lowest difficulty and being responsible for most of my deaths. I eventually came to realize how many opportunities I'd been missing to upgrade my ship. The most obvious is collecting little drops from enemies, which look like Geometry Wars's "geoms" but count toward ship upgrades, forcing you to actually be in the action and carve a path through instead of playing passively. Less initially obvious in terms of importance are special encounters and objectives which can drop items for upgrading your ship or applying a perk. The game places the different limited-time upgrades around the map and immediately refills your dash cooldown when you dash into them, which combined with the aforementioned stuff makes you stay engaged with the entire shifting play area.
There's a slight dilemma where I want to say Stage 1 is still too hard to smoothly onboard new players, but having it be both hard and flexible makes replaying that part engaging even after you get better at the game. If you are successfully getting all these upgrades and manage to conserve your shields, it's the middle of the game that can often feel easier. While there are always threats and the possibilities for very bad situations due to the game's randomness between runs, I was usually dying either in Stage 1 where I'm slower and less powerful, or in Stage 5 like 30+ minutes into my run. I found myself in a bit of a trap struggling to get runs going with how much easier it was for me personally to make a mistake in Stage 1 and how long the game is with limited lives, making me want to reset right away after any early mistake. Unlike the kind of bullet hell shmup games I'm used to, it's not like you can memorize and fully master individual stages due to the randomness, so resetting was a bit more demoralizing. The stages also looking basically the same with exchangeable bosses made it kinda hard to feel like I was getting somewhere as well, with runs sometimes blending together in my head—in my first clear, I didn't even realize I was back at the final boss until the game ended...
Still, it's certainly satisfying to start at that weaker and slower state and gradually become a super-powered ship while also leveling up your understanding of how to play. It's a game that really knows what it's doing in terms of making different ideas work together, with the ultimate goal of pushing you into the fun and efficient way to play once you are comfortable with the basics. Those fundamental gameplay ideas are pretty great, snappy movement thanks to the dash, interesting variety of enemy behaviors, nice feeling weapons where you really feel the upgrades, and so on. And it does need to be somewhat hard to let all that shine, even if I don't think it would hurt to have an even easier mode to ease people in. The perk system has you select which 9 sets of perks you want to see randomly pop up before you start each run, which is also kind of a cool way to adjust how you play and add more interesting decisions and variation.
The game is mostly pretty legible even with so much extra stuff to keep track of, with clear visual language which helps a lot with this punishing and somewhat precise gameplay, but does at points feel messy. There’s a power-up for example that’s really strong and hard to get, but it makes it extremely hard for me to see the red highlight when an area is about to disappear, and missing that is an instant game over which is super frustrating deep into a solid run after doing the steps to unlock it. Red bullets fired from some enemies are also hard for me to see in scenarios toward the end of the game where the enemy density gets really high. I just felt in a few cases like what killed me wasn’t quite fair, but for the most part it does feel fair as you learn what everything does and how to move and prioritize threats.
As previously mentioned, there are a bunch of more arcadey side modes which are a nice relief from the meaty campaign mode. While you have to play campaign a bit to unlock them, these would be a good place for less-experienced players to spend some time getting better at the fundamentals, particularly in the first one which is relatively straightforward and classic stuff. Honestly there are only a couple of these modes that I'm into, and I'm disappointed in the mode inspired by Geometry Wars 2's great "Pacifism" mode which just doesn't feel as good, but it's nice that even this stuff has received some decent extra effort with a way to unlock special modifiers that further mix things up. Even in that simple classic mode which strips out some of what makes the game unique, it is a lot of fun.
This is a tough one to widely recommend to everyone due to its difficulty, but those who are seeking a challenge and like this kind of thing should find it super engaging. I was initially a bit of a skeptic, but it was just fun enough to keep me coming back until it all came together and became really enjoyable.
