Recently, I've tried a lot of indie games with unique graphics, medium size, and some innovation in terms of gameplay. Coincidentally, they all have more or less roguelike elements added to them - in 2023, meat pigeons are still so "useful" for independent studios.
As an increasingly common and popular game genre today, the "meat pigeon game" that can randomly generate maps and encourage players to challenge repeatedly has certainly reduced the pressure on level design for small and medium-sized studios, but with the gradual increase of similar games, it still needs a lot of work to satisfy the player base with higher and higher thresholds.
Another meat pigeon game, Wild Gunslinger, released just a few days ago and published by the player's old friend Devolver, is a typical example of this genre.
Currently 84% positive rating on Steam
On Steam, the game's popular hashtags include "sandbox," "survival," and "exploration," which I've noticed often referred to in player discussions as a "shooter version of Starve," which is not surprising given their similar graphics and construction gameplay.
However, from my actual experience, "Wild Gun Witch" is actually a "brush brush" type game with stronger combat and shooting elements.
According to the setting of the game, the world of the character is destroyed due to the arrival of the "chaos creature", and the player needs to travel to the 5 minutes before the world collapses again and again through a machine that can reverse time, looking for clues, defeating monsters and ultimately saving the world.
This setting also leads to the core mechanic of the game - each map is randomly fought for 5 minutes, and the player needs to search for material, explore the map, and defeat enemies in a limited amount of time. Once the 5 minutes run out, a large number of powerful "Chaos" enemies will appear on the map, and the ground will collapse at an accelerated rate.
Blocks in the game can both collapse and be repaired with items
The main combat style of the game and the elements that form the core of Build are "guns and bullets". As the story progresses, players unlock four weapons in turn: close-range shotguns, long-range rifles, high-rate machine guns, and balanced revolvers.
Although there are slightly fewer types of weapons, the real highlight of Wild Gun Witch is the bullet inside the barrel. Since it is a "gun witch", the game allows players to make a variety of "enchanted bullets", for example, in the early days of the game, there are four basic types of "burning, cold, poison, and charm" that I can study and produce, and each bullet will also have a different elemental effect on the enemy.
According to common game logic, bullets such as "Burning, Toxin" can naturally cause continuous damage to enemies, "Ice" can slow down the enemy's movement speed, and "Enchantment" is more special, allowing enemies to fight for you.
With the deepening of the research progress, more special effects of new bullets can be derived from these four basic classifications. For example, "cold ice" can be derived from "water bullets" that splash water on targets, "frozen bombs" that directly freeze the enemy, and "ice wall bombs" that instantly change the terrain; The life attributes corresponding to "Enchantment" can also be developed to restore life "healing bombs", "resurrection bombs" to revive teammates, and so on.
As the different technologies in the research station advance, you can equip the gun with all kinds of bullets with strange effects, and the bullets can also interact with each other.
For example, hitting an enemy that has been attached to a "wet" water bullet with an electric shock bomb will have a chain conductive effect, but if you switch to ice bullets, it will directly freeze the enemy. This kind of "elemental reaction" interaction is particularly interesting under the game's wide variety of bullet types, although not any two bullets can react, but there are still many combinations that can be tried, and this also supports the meaning of repeated challenges in the game to a certain extent.
The effect produced when fired at gasoline with an incendiary projectile
In addition to the ability to combine bullets with different effects, the game also allows players to attach "magic powder" (which can also be understood as gun accessories) that can provide additional effects, in addition to improving the basic attributes of bullets, you can also add intuitive additional effects, such as "automatic enemy request", "expand range", "split", "ejection" and so on.
The free combination of bullets and magic powder makes it easy to hit a variety of attack modes with completely different effects, which is one of the cool points of "Wild Gun Witch".
In addition, it must be added that elemental bullets can affect the enemy in addition to the nature of the collection, such as the same trees, if you shoot with a flame bullet, it is "charcoal" that falls, and with a toxin bullet, the dropped object becomes "rotten wood", and if you use an electric shock bullet to shoot metal, you will get a special "charged metal ingot", which corresponds to the reinforcement material of different attribute bullets.
The variety of attacks and builds through the combination of bullets, magic powder, and firearms is indeed the most interesting thing about Wild Gunmen, but I also noticed that on Steam, many players gave bad reviews as "another game of hitting crayfish with a stick":
Everyone may have seen a meme picture - at level 1, you hit ordinary crayfish with a wooden stick, and at level 99, you hit super crayfish with a legendary wooden stick.
After more than 5 hours of play, I did clearly experience this feeling. Because the entire game flow is basically a repeated cycle of "fighting monsters - obtaining materials - strengthening weapons - fighting stronger monsters". Although most roguelike games inevitably have the problem of "brushing and brushing", this feeling is especially obvious in "Wild Gun Witch", in addition to the huge amount of material required to strengthen bullets, which takes too much time, I think it is also because there are fewer types of monsters in the later stage, and the homogenization is serious, which is basically the difference between "crayfish" and "legendary crayfish", plus in addition to the "enhanced weapon" thing, the game basically has no other goals.
And the "sandbox construction" mentioned in the previous introduction, except for a small number of functional buildings, the rest of the items are decorative and cannot produce other interactive effects, resulting in most players, the goal of the game is really only "fighting monsters" and "upgrades" two choices, a single gameplay leads to the later game part gradually boring, naturally there is a boring feeling.
As a small meat pigeon game, "Wild Gun Witch" is relatively well polished in its core combat mechanism, but due to the slight lack of content volume in the later stage and the serious homogeneity of gameplay, it will also make some players feel "boring", but fortunately, the game also supports multiplayer cooperation, and the follow-up development team also has a plan to continuously maintain and update, which is still a worthwhile choice overall.