I know I said I would play the Supergiant games, but they weren't on sale sooooo...
I got another roguelite instead, Kiborg. The main reason I was interested was because it is available on Mac, but I was itching to just kill a ridiculous number of enemies after school has been so stressful. The game hardly runs amazing on a Macbook Air, but after some fiddling around it has become pretty playable. For the first few hours, I crashed at least once an hour. 6 hours in, and I just finished a multi-hour session with no crashes.
The game looks quite generic, gritty sci-fi environments filled with bandits, robots, and mutants. Pretty bog standard. There's quite a few visual glitches, and each time you go to a new area, the lighting presets switch in a really obvious and ugly manner. But like I said, all I really wanted to was to murder things.
The gameplay is quite fun. The melee combat is a basic light + heavy attack + dodge roll + parry affair elevated by breakable melee weapons and this neat mechanic where you can lock on to enemies and launch yourself across the entire level at them. It's such an obvious mechanic that makes the melee feel like a more interesting, slower Arkham combat. The other half of the game is ranged combat split between a primary weapon and a sidearm. The primary weapon feels like shit honestly, aiming and recoil control is just not as smooth as it needs to be. The sidearm can't be aimed, and is used more for quickdraw shots in between punching.
There's a skill tree that seems decent so far. I invested really early on in health upgrades, and that seems to have been the right choice. During runs, you get upgrades via cybernetic limbs, that can be further modified with mutations. A lot of them sound kind of boring honestly, but there a select few that make things fucking ridiculous. The upgrade system can also heavily push you into melee or ranged, some of them literally disable your ability to parry or even ranged weapons entirely.
I just beat the final boss on the first difficulty level, mainly due to how broken my build became. I got two upgrades that allows unequipped melee weapons rotate around me dealing damage and makes enemies randomly drop melee weapons. When fighting the boss, I had close to 50 weapons floating around me. I didn't know what would happen first, me winning just by standing there or the game crashing due to all these effects.
Oh, and there's a story. I got the game for what, 9 dollars? Pretty great deal for such a unique experience. I have come to associate indie games with card builders, top down shooters, 2D brawlers, etc. It's lovely to have an experience that plays like AAA game but without the AAA bloat, graphics, and price
