Creating overpowered builds has never been this simple | Review - Time to Strike (Demo)
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✨Overview
Time to Strike is as an upcoming bullet hell rogue-like twin stick shooter, teasing players with its demo available on Steam and a scheduled release in Q1 2024. It aims to provide streamlined gameplay with a sprinkle of chaos and unpredictability. With 30+ weapons, 30+ powerful mods, 80+ fun relics, and 5 challenging boss fights in the full version.
⭐️Demo Score: 7/10
📖Story and Premise
Time to Strike focuses 100% on gameplay with 0% narrative, the premise is clear – survive the onslaught of enemies, defeat challenging bosses, and aim for the highest score. Players are thrust into a small rectangular arena, armed with their choices to come up with overpowered 'busted' builds and wild synergies.
🎨Visuals and Art
I didn’t expect the arena survival genre to appear even more basic than Vampire Survivors, yet, at the same time, maintain a modern look. However, here we are, with a game having a retro vibe but still having sharply designed and streamlined visuals. The art design is straightforward minimalistic, featuring predominantly circular or pill-shaped elements on the screen, encompassing everything from the player character to the enemies and projectiles.
🎮Gameplay
The game places players in a compact rectangular arena with the objective of surviving the onslaught of enemies and defeating a series of bosses, all while aiming for the highest score once everything is concluded. At its core, Time to Strike is a twin-stick shooter, demanding the use of both movement and aiming controls—either analog sticks or WASD+mouse. Weapons are not automatically fired; instead, aiming is done manually.
At its core, Time to Strike is a twin stick shooter that demands both precision and creativity. The player is armed with two weapons – a ranged one that changes with the selected character, and a melee bat called Time Strike, pivotal for both defense and reloading.
The bat serves a crucial role, capable of deflecting projectiles and activating a bullet time mode. It also plays a pivotal role in reloading your ammo—every successful hit results in a complete reload, and there are no alternative method for reloading besides picking up power-ups.
Swinging the bat is governed by a stamina system, while the ranged attack is managed through an ammo system, in turn being also dependent on the melee stamina system for reloads. There is a separate stamina for the Dash ability, which makes you temporary invulnerable during dashing.
⚔️Combat
That’s basically the gist of it. A variety of enemies will spawn with their own kind of gimmicks such as exploding on death, or having undeflectable projectiles, and you’d have to do your best to defeat them all. The rectangular map very small and did not change all throughout the Demo, and it somewhat adds to the challenge. There is limited space to operate, often finding myself backed against one of its four walls, managing depleting stamina and ammo.
The fun factor in this game, or at least in this demo lies in creating overpowered builds from a varying of Relics and Weapon Mods that you can select in this game everytime you clear a level. Bullets bouncing? Explosions on Hit? Bullets splitting up? Zombies spawning? Turrets firing? It’s up to you how to come up with game breaking builds. Despite the visual simplicity, the game still does what a bullet hell game does best — cluttering your screen in a chaotic array of projectiles, explosions, and enemies.
While these builds can be ultra-powerful, there are instances where their effectiveness works against the player due to visual clutter, obscuring both the player and projectiles, making it challenging to avoid. Fortunately, the game compensates for this by being forgiving in terms of health points, offering players numerous opportunities to navigate challenges effectively.
⏫Progression
The game begins with the selection of player character, starting traits, and difficulty level. Subsequently, you progress through a series of linear levels one after the other. Upon the conclusion of a run, you earn currency to spend on unlocking new characters and starting traits. There isn't much variety in the progression and core gameplay loop, as the most of the fun lies in experimentation and seeing your work build.
📊Technical Performance
The demo ran with zero issues and will definitely work on most computers and it’s even a perfect candidate for mobile gaming, although there are no video options like running in windowed mode or changing the resolution.
There is controller support available in the demo, in addition to the traditional mouse and keyboard controls, but I find that they lack feature parity. When using controllers, there is no way to view the characteristics of weapons and relics while selecting upgrades between levels, requiring a bit of reliance on memory and guesswork. On the mouse, however, I can easily hover over the icons and read the descriptions.
⚖️Conclusion
The majority of the relics, mods, and boss relics remain locked in the demo, alongside other characters, starting weapons, and difficulty options. I don't anticipate these locked elements changing the fundamental gameplay; they may just add a few extra hours of tinkering and experimentation.
However, there might not be enough content in the full version to sustain prolonged interest. Overall though, I had fun with Time to Strike Demo and managed to clear it twice in under an hour. I feel like I've explored much of what the game has to offer mechanically in this brief demo. Ultimately, Time to Strike appears to be quite straightforward, with a rather conservative scope. If you're looking for a quick rogue-like bullet hell game --- hopefully at a cheap price, to enjoy for a day or two and perhaps return back to occasionally, then Time to Strike might be a choice to scratch that itch once it releases.
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