Recent reviews by Runner

Initially was worried that I was "only" shooting robots, but quickly realized this was real classic fast paced gunplay with a broad weapon variety and a nice destructible-ish environment that was worth playing through for an afternoon FPS romp with decent, well performing graphics. On sales or in bundles it costs 2-5 bucks - super worth it!

The whistle sounds. We run. We cannot see for all the smoke, the flashes in our eyes, their screams in our ears. We bleed, we fight - most die. The sun goes down and so do we. Once more the world turns and we hear: The whistle sounds. We run.

This game, even at 4 bucks is worth it, let alone at 1,59 EUR that its on sale for right now.
Its a kindasorta basic bullethell rogueliteish survival shooter, but, thankfully, not based on time, but on reaching a number of "gears" to pick up per level.
There is a decent variation of different crafts each with their own buff focus (+1 pierce on every x level kinda thing) and similiarly a decent amount of turrets to get. Plus things blow up and get frantic and you get to feel smart about dodging and surviving and, well, this is really all I want from a quick round of arcadey fun to play. Full and easy recommend.

After some patches the game seems mildly (!) better, getting it to a "mildly recommend" kind of 6 out of 10 place. Mostly deserved just by virtue of having a good bunch of content and characters for the price.

Some criticisms on the game:

The gameplay:
Zoom does not change. It should be closer when in person, a bit zoomed out when a car. GTA 2 did this very well, here its just fixed. Granted, switching back and forth eventually becomes much more often and tactical.
Sadly, impacts feel like...nothing. Not with the car, not with orbiting stuff, not with sword hits. It all just feels...like mild nudge fluff. Real shame, feel is 99% of a game.
Sounds are meh. Music is meh. A lot if upgrades I could do without. No way found on initial play how to reroll or choose whether I want an "on foot" or an "as car" upgrade. I expect there is a lot more depth with the meta currencies, but good lord, the initial impression of how to grind the meta currency is...terrible.

The core concept is good. You are basically invincible as car, but on an energy timer that doubles as health and on foot you are squishy and easily dedded. Makes it even worse you cannot apparently be more decisive in your ingame upgrade path for each.

Overall, for such a low price, content is A LOT and I suspect there is a lot of potential to be unearthed here. However, this by no means feels like a genuine 1.0, but still something that needs HEAVY ongoing bugfixing and especially development to increase the "fun factor". Running over people - anything not a huge robot, so at least the minions - should be squishy and fun.
Hitting stuff with a sword should be fun and dismember and such. Screw the stupid Ages 12 and up rating, go for more mature gameplay and stop making this a Sunday Cartoon. Make it fun, make it a grindfest, give it all more heft, sound, feel and this could be one hell of an epic game.
Until then...dunno, 5 out of 10 for a VS-like at best, no bonus points for the Transformer aspect, as its not fun enough and more a functional way to even get around the map.
Shame so much potential is there but not unleashed yet. I am rooting for these guys, I really am, but for now my verdict is to either wait if you have better stuff to play, or to buy it and wait, or, if you really are into this genre, at least poke your head in with a timer to stay under 2 hours and see for yourself.
I will keep the game, but only because its no money to me and i want to support the devs so this can become actually fun.

Thanks for reading.


Edit:
I will move the initial issues down here. A lot of things seem to be mildly improved, though I have not started without a save in place, so could be they still do the "throw you right in" thing.

I am a big collector of VSurvivors-likes, plus I come from Death Rally and Carmageddon heritage, so I feel okay qualified to judge this game.
Basics first though:
It throws you into the game without even letting you configure your language. As with many games lately, I have found that even later, when you CAN change language after quitting/dying eventually, half the stuff is still the wrong old language. Sigh.

The text itself:
Translation of most text is horrendous and simply wrong. You can play fine, but man, there must have been ZERO Q&A done. I found several strings that still had formatting commands, so not even syntax is correct.

Okay, so the truth is, you are giving a nice dude a tip for making what is in essence a very short, very entertaining proof of concept game around a mix of Survivors-like and oldschool arcadeyish miniquest pew pew on a single map.
It is worth buying, because you can feel the genuine attempt at making a game with love.
It should however be viewed as more as an incentive for the dev to build on this foundation, because it would not be very difficult to add new maps and a few ships and some more weapons and a bit more meta progression - and voila, you would not have just 2 hours of gameplay, but 20 or more.
So, by all means: We need more devs like this, more games like this, but also: Evolution from here. Enjoy.

Absolutely must play. Basically "Remember GTA 1? Now picture it as a roguelike with increasing chances of beating the army until you die in a blaze of glory."

How can anyone not be sold on that?
Still has a buttload of bugs (language change is..weird, GPU goes nuts despite Vsync being on that kind of stuff), but overall what a terrific amount of fun for a very low price.
I hope this sells VERY well so that it continues getting updates (and vehicles, pedestrians, weapons, slaughter sounds, maps, etc).

tl;dr: Upgrades too rng instead of shaped to your desired playstile; does not value your time investment; makes final/synergy upgrades not very transparent initially; tedious af. Could be good if this were fixed.

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Could be a top tier Vampire-Survivors-Like roguelike, but the usual genre BS is hampering decent fun playtime.
Why?
There is no banish, rerolls are VERY limited and unless you really get a specific synergy build going with the mech you are using, you will simply invest 10-20 minutes into certain failure, because the culmination of the map will simply overwhelm you unless you are sufficiently powered.
You would think an intelligent game design would exist with which the ranged mech only gets suggested ranged upgrades (or at the VERY FRICKIN LEAST there is an option to do so or pre-select available upgrades for the map, or SOMETHING) and the blade based mech mainly gets the blade related main upgrades, and so on. But no. You might simply in the middle of a map run out of rerolls, get crappy non-synergy main weapons and then just plain lose and waste your time, as stated above.
Death must die has started to understand this dilemma and allowed skill trees, Swarm Grinder is still stuck in "must be roguelike and therefore peak annoying or I'm not a kewl roguelike" mode.
This is doubly sad, as this also prevents reaching upgrade path end-upgrades which boost specific styles even more.
If there were an option to narrow in on what kind of upgrade path you want to take (and, quite frankly, I would prefer doing this with either infinite rerolls and banishes or just plain with choosing my available upgrade options in advance without punishment) and a bit more sensible upgrade options in and of themselves (you have a "pacemaker" passive which supposedly helps with fuel consumption and survivability and then 2/3 of the options INCREASE fuel usage, yepp, that's right).

Anyway. Really fun the every 3rd to 5th time you manage to luck into your actually wanted build, horrendously tedious the rest of the time. Oh, and to add insult to injury? The meta upgrades have tiny steps like 2% faster movement, but costs like 2 completed runs, which, as stated above can mean 2 hours of pointless grind until you get there.
Fix these issues and you have a good game going.

Contender for best Vampire-Survivor-like in the genre / fantasy genre, I have to say (and I have bought and/or played over 20 by now).

Classes feel decently distinct, the levels have okay amounts of stuff to smash, spawn, buy and the meta progression isn't horrible. Given that it is still in EA, I expect some more balancing overall eventually, and maybe even some new "tiers" for the meta (as you can already get fairly filled out in just the first level alone, but seem to need a lot more power for level 2 already).
Overall: Strong recommendation for just 5 bucks.

Preface: I own over 20 games from this genre and have put in well over 40 hours into them total in turn (more into the top tiers, less than half an hour into boring/horrible made cashgrabby ones).
Here?
Atrocious start phase - you need to find stuff to smash open and hope every other thingie contains 10 coins, of which you need 100 per every single small step genre classic upgrade (10% strength, 0.01 hp recovery/s, magnet range and so forth).
Since you move like stuck in quicksand without upgrades, your runs are inevitably limited to 5 minutes, because thats when the first super huge HP bar boss comes out, which, despite using your "ultimate" attack to get that bar down 50%, will just threeshot your unpowered up butt and thats it.
Doomed to crawling around for another 5 minutes, in hope of RNGsus giving you more coins this time so that maybe in 4-5 hours you get to a point where OTHER GAMES IN THE GENRE START.

I appreciate that they are patching stuff, but has nobody played this and tested it for actual FUN while playing? You are literally cloning the Vampire Survivors starting character and attack and weird, nobody hated that game, huh. Maybe YOU are doing something wrong here. Sigh.
Might revisit in half a year.

A sh*tshow of handling of your playerbase. IO has let me buy this game what feels like a million times, then given me the finger and said "Oh and btw, now its World of Assassination, pay up again, you fools AHAHAHAHA".

They deserve to go broke forever, full stop.