[GrimmSweeper]

This came out on Steam recently as a full release. You are one of like 10 different characters each with a different set of four abilities, hurtling down to an unknown planet in an escape pod. To survive, you must run-n-gun in a 2D landscape to a teleporter, survive through waves of hostile monsters (along with a boss!) while it charges, and hop, skip, jump your way to a working ship.

To help you on your journey, shipping crates that have had gotten lost on their journey to other parts of space are scattered across the landscape. If you can pay their shipping fee, you can open them for trinkets that boost your base stats like attack speed or adding effects like life-stealing on critical hits. There are also shrines that require some sacrifice to be made for a chance of the same thing. Not all trinkets are available from the beginning; they are unlocked through achievements

You start the game with only the Commando unlocked. He's pretty average but shows off what to expect in terms of abilities. With default keyboard controls Z is your dual pistols with no cooldown, X is a piercing shot that briefly stuns, C is your escape roll giving you invulnerability, and V is blazing guns akimbo shooting all enemies in range for a couple seconds.

As you explore each level, you will find traces of the other characters which will unlock them for use in subsequent attempts. There are things like a melee-oriented Acrid, GIANT ROBOT HAN-D, or the always on the move Huntress.

Also features CO-OP mode over LAN and online! Three difficulty modes! Loads of indices to read up on little tidbits of lore from each trinket or monster you've killed! And if you're feeling sassy, you can NG+(+++...) for as long as you can survive, increasing the number of elite normal monsters AND the number of bosses fought concurrently.

(My last NG++ death was from battling 5 Magma worms at once)

This game is good, grab it for you and for your friends.

[GrimmSweeper]

In the demo they supposedly ramp up the difficulty a lot more quickly than they do in the normal game.

Normally,
- Drizzle is rather flat, the items you pick up will more than mitigate the HP increase. It's a good place to start to get familiar with the concept but it gets rather boring pretty quickly with the lack of challenge. You will not be able to get monster logs in this difficulty but everything else seems to be unlocked/unlockable. NG+ cycles aren't a huge hike from normal.

- Rainstorm is where the continuous time pressure makes a difference. If you aren't efficient you are going to be swamped as you get to stages four, five and final. It's got a good difficulty curve once familiar but starts to pall as you become skilled at the game. NG+ cycles will add more than one boss at a time and occasionally spawns bosses while you're wandering around.

- Monsoon takes the gloves off immediately. 120 second wait for the teleporter to charge instead of the normal 90. 3 minutes to next difficulty breakpoint; about 30 to max it out. In Rainstorm it was a possibility to be mobbed near the end; here this is a certainty. A lot more elite versions of enemies spawning at all times. NG+ cycle will also not waste time in spawning in bosses as you frantically look for the teleporter (my last game I had about 7 in the first stage of NG+) and will start off with Elite versions and 1-2 normal bosses during warm-up period.

The final boss is sort of a flat note though. He's got loads of HP, 3 forms, and an ability to reduce all damage down to 1 that he uses at certain HP breakpoints. If you can do him in on Drizzle you can do the same with little change to how you play in Monsoon.

[GrimmSweeper]

No item gives you negative effects. Everything is a benefit, slight (piggybank) or insane (one reduces cooldowns by 25%). So in single player at least there is no real choice to be made in opening chests; the result is always going to make you more powerful. The other chest options--see 3, pick 1 and blip through a list of randomised items quickly--do have optimal choices but aren't truly satisfying. One of them is always going to be the best no matter the circumstances and you're gambling with the last chest option.

What I would like to see are items that feature tradeoffs for powerful benefits. Maybe you can no longer regen HP normally but must stay on corpses to 'eat' them and regen at a higher rate. Maybe you'll turn to stone and take less damage from enemies but are slowed down. Maybe you find a weapon that replaces your normal Z action but chips away at your HP to fire it.

[GrimmSweeper]

Do remember that they were Kickstarted into stretch goals, so development of more things (Arena and Game Mutators are known) to do is not yet complete. Whether it will maintain an audience until the next new facet is debatable; I've got all the classes unlocked at this point and finished a Monsoon run with the Huntress. I could see myself trying to win on all classes in at least Rainstorm difficulty but beyond that I got what I needed from the game.