Title Title!

Welcome a new blog series called Pudding Game Collection! (PGC for short!)

This is a simple series, it’s just me talking about a group of games I played recently that sometimes, and sometimes not, can be grouped together under one umbrella!

This basically mashing 3 small blogs together into one big one with a proper format.

Today’s volume is: Bullet Heaven With Stakes!

Some people say that this genre is boring because there are no stakes.

So, here’s some games that do have stakes!

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In this game of an ever evolving creature, hunting and eating to grow stronger and become a horrendous monster and defeat a boss at the end!

Look at my crab!

Each time you level up, you get the usual three options for upgrades, but in this game, they are animal evolutions that reflect on your blob!

Evolutions have 5 different types of affinities, which are basically “types of builds” you can focus on with their mechanics to focus on and all that good stuff. There’s also a difficult to tap in affinity which is the fabled crab one, which makes you take more damage but you get greater rewards.

What makes this game different from the usual bullet heaven is the distinct lack of… bullets. Instead, your blob is thrown in the middle of an ecosystem with animals already doing their own stuff. Just walk around, eat fruits, hunt for meat, dodge predators and attacks from other animals.

You have a lot more agency in this one, you are not just at the mercy of an endless wave of enemies walking towards you.

Aside from that, it works exactly like the rest, after a few minutes a boss spawns and so on.

Chaotic ecosystem!

Something else this game makes different is the rarity system for level ups.

Each evolution comes with a random rarity that will increase the stats of that evolution and will persist on the subsequent upgrades of that evolution. High rarity = good.

There’s a bit of strategy involved with this, because you have the option to upgrade the rarity of your “choose 3” with points you get from killing big guys. You can strategically upgrade an already chosen evolution to get more stats from the upgrades, or try to aim to get an evolution at max rarity to maximize your gains.

It's a fun system to play with.

The only problem with this game is that it asks a lot of you, but doesn’t have the content to keep you engaged.

The main mode is a 20 step difficulty stair where you climb by winning runs in each difficulty.

The game has over 120 evolutions, which sounds like a lot, but after you reach the 10th step of that stair and play a few of the challenges… you pretty much saw all it had to offer.

Upgrading my crab.

Runs feel very samey and kind of boring even with the increased agency and difficulty. (The difficulty jumps from step to step is very gradual, very little changes, which only adds to the tedium.)

The challenges are cool and do force you to play, unfortunately they are locked behind milestone steps…

There’s the DNA system, which is basically 2 unique perks you pick at the start of a run, that helps with some variety, but those don't do enough as well.

Small almost crab.

I had fun with the game, the gameplay is as addictive as one would expect and the added agency makes it engaging. But after reaching halfway through the stair, I got bored and quit.

The game really needs more content to justify length.

I would recommend getting this game when it’s on sale or later when it gets more updates with new content.

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A title perhaps more fitting of the Bullet Heaven genre.

Enemies are swarming you and you have to fight back with your weapons.

What makes this one different from the rest is that you are a tank with tank controls!

…

Okay, it’s not just that, your tank is a building block where you can attach things!

Building my monster!

Every level up gives you a choice of one piece to put on your tank, which you have to attach to your tank to get the bonus.

Weapons are also like that! You can have a billion weapons, but you have to attach all of them to your tank and build out your monstrosity while also keeping in mind that all the weapons have light of sight/ need to be placed in specific spots to work best.

Having to engage with the building aspect every level up might sound like a huge pace breaker, but to be honest, that wasn't the case for me. I was just as engaged as I was fighting.

There’s 4 characters you can play as, each featuring their some exclusive blocks and their own gimmicks with their boost mechanic… which are kind of a mixed back. Half were fun, and the other half was just okay.

There’s 4 stages to play which have their own preset layout and small gimmicks & waves of enemies. You unlock higher difficulties by doing challenges in said stages to get stars!

Those were a lot of fun…

But the higher difficulties really emphasized the game's flaws.

Fun fact: I died a lot due to tank controls.

In the Bullet Heaven genre, the worst sin you can commit to increase difficulty, at least for me, is to take away options from the player. Which this game does…

In this sort of game, you rely purely on RNG to win difficult challenges, because you literally can't avoid the enemies all around you.

Having less cards to draw just makes the experience frustrating.

Unlocks are also a big miss here, there some good ones but most of the solid, reliable blocks/ weapons are the ones available at base. So unlocking stuff hurts you because it adds a bunch of other stuff that is less reliable than the base things.

I played and liked this game a lot, but decided to drop out from the 100% journey after feeling the frustrating experience of high difficulty & how clunky the 4th character is.

I would recommend this game at full price, it’s fun enough for what it is! By the time you get to high difficulties, you will be plenty satisfied.

I saw that it got an update recently that did address some of these complaints I had, so the devs are actively addressing issues and updating the game.

I didn’t play after the update though, so I don't know how impactful it was.

(Update: I had to play to get some screenshots, and they changed the character specific challenges to be general challenges.)

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Have you ever thought of mixing Bullet Heaven with Breakout? AND putting a town building aspect on it??

This wild mix of genres actually makes for a pretty great and unique game!

Ball X Pit has two phases for the gameplay, the first one is the combat.

You fight enemies in a Breakout type way, you aim the ball, shoot and try to maximize the damage of the balls by making them bounce to other enemies and making them get to the back of the board! Fun Breakout stuff!

The rest plays out like the usual Bullet Heaven game, endless waves of enemies that come towards you, level ups, upgrades and fusions…?

Many balls.

After killing a certain number of enemies, you will get a special power that allows you pick one of three options:
Evolution - If you have the required equipment, you can combine them to evolve into something else!

Upgrade - Get a couple of level ups on your weapons/ passives.

Fusion - The coolest thing ever.

Balls (these are your weapons if you didn’t clock that in yet.) that are max lvl can be combined together to make one ball with both effects!

For example, if you have a NUCLEAR BOMB ball you can combine Cell bomb, which splits into two on hit, and create a ball that is a NUCLEAR BOMB that splits into OTHER NUCLEAR BOMBS!

You can do this with any ball you want, as long as that ball is not already fused!

And the fusion system is well thought out too, because they do take into account a lot of the effects that feel like they wouldn’t work.

Million balls.

The game also has a bunch of characters you can play that feature their own gimmicks.

One of the crazier gimmicks was from a character that turns this game into a TURN BASED GAME! That was shocking to me!

After you are done with the combat, you return to base where the town building comes to play.

You place houses, resources and buildings to construct and then send your workers to collect them, still in the Breakout style!

They will be bouncing around all over the place, collecting resources and building things when hitting it.

I have less to say about this part, but I still had a lot of fun!

Town Breakout!

Out of the three games today, this one the best one for sure. There’s a variety of different characters to play as, many stages with their own gimmicks and a lot of balls to find and fuse!

I had lots of fun with it~

I beat the game and completed all the achivos available. I didn’t complete the game itself 100% because the new game+ stuff is just more stage grinding which I wasn’t down for.

Still, no complaints from me, just a solid, very addictive Bullet Heaven game!

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A bonus in the very first volume?

This is a party (or I guess “friendslop”) type of game inspired by Helldivers 2 where you go to a stage, get loot, do objectives and extract!

What makes this one different is that this game has very fluid movement and trades stratagems for elemental spells that are synergistic with each other!

Oh, and there’s some lite Roguelike gameplay in the missions themselves.

Here's a random screenshot I don't remember taking.

The movement in this game is pretty fun to do, you can really speed through the map if you time your bunnyhops perfectly. Plus it makes dodging the many bullets and enemies coming towards you more in your control! (I guess you could consider this game a Bullet Heaven… but of the Hell variety?)

It also made finding the many secrets the stages have a lot more fun.

The joker system is also cool. Enemies and some chests have a chance to drop a joker that gives you some unique effects such as “more damage while airborne” and those kinds of cool effects. You can have multiple of one effect and they all mostly stack.

While this system makes each mission more fun, because it adds more variety on the type of builds you will have during a mission, I think the game needs more jokers.

A lot of the effects are simple, but they can do so much with unique gimmicks.

You can also equip jokers back at base on weapons/ your characters so you can start with them in the mission.

You can also upgrade them, which gives you something to grind for.

My only complaint is that things are very grindy… it took a long time for me to unlock a single weapon… but I’m also playing the game wrong.

Apologies but I can’t give a concrete review of this because uh- NOBODY WANTS TO PLAY THIS WITH ME!

Me and a couple of friends bought the game and played like, 3 matches? After that, any time I asked to play I was met with silence… so I had to wing things by myself.

Maybe the game is not grindy, since you will have 3 other heads doing stuff like you are.

But that’s the experience of an (abandoned) solo player… yippee…

(The game had matchmaking, but I wanted to play at my own pace, so I stuck with the lone road.)

Fart Nuke

If you can find a group to play with, this game is a lot of fun!

If you are going solo, it’s also a fun game! Just grindy.

I recommend buying this at full price, you will get lots of fun from it. Plus the devs are very active, so there’s lots of updates to come it seems.

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And that’s a wrap on the first PGC!

I wanna keep doing this as a “series” for the blog.

I think it’s a good way to group small topics I don't have much to talk about/ games that will likely only appear once in the blog.

Open to feedback on what else to add to make this series better.

Suprise Banger!

For the first time in a while, I feel bad for getting a game for FREE!

Because it's such a great game!

Megaman But Fists!

Gravity Circuit is a Megaman/ X style game where you play as a robot named Kai, fighting through the virus army to save the planet!

With your BARE FISTS!

Unlike the inspirations, the combat in this game is purely melee based and you have a simple combo you can perform plus aerial attacks.

Being strictly melee is a huge downside, so to make up for it, you have a grapple hook!

You can cling yourself to walls or ceilings using it, but also, grab enemies (or their ragdolls) and throw them into other enemies!

Throwing things back at enemies basically kills them instantly, and then you can grab the ragdoll of that enemy you just defeated to defeat the next one and continue the insane speedy cycle to quickly get through a stage. If you want to go fast in this one, better utilize all the ragdolls you can get a hold off!

In the place of weapon abilities obtained from bosses, Kai gets EX powers, which only 4 can be equipped at one time and you need to charge your EX gauge to use it. It’s basically an ultimate attack/ move. The counter was my favorite one.

There’s also extra perks you can equip that give you various bonuses, such as one that lets you double jump, another to attack faster or another to give you invincibility on slide, etc. There’s a bunch of those, so there’s a lot of customization and builds you can do!

…Even if there’s a bit of the Hollow Knight effect, where most of the options get severely outclassed by the really good ones.

You get these perks by rescuing bots hidden throughout a stage.

You can also find extra hidden paints in the stages that serve as more powerful perks!

The game is naturally pretty tough, melee combat in a Megaman style game makes things pretty difficult. But the game gives you a bunch of tools, such as the ones listed above, to help you!

I got my ass kicked for a bit before being able to tackle the challenges with confidence and speed.

Full of Style!

The story starts off a bit simple, you are Gravity Circuit™ and your allies, now turned rebels, are fighting on the side of the virus army and you have to stop them from destroying the planet.

You get bits of lore after defeating each robot master, but the bulk of the story is in the last third of the game.

Pretty cool lore too!

These are so cool!

Something I really like is that the game is full of style!

The artwork on display here is awesome, love to see stylized pixel art, and the animations are equally as great.

Characters are all sentai themed, which is pretty genius for a Megaman inspired game.

The OST is really good too, there’s some great tunes throughout the game. There’s even clever uses of music at the end, that I’ll let you discover for yourself.

It’s a pretty short game, I got almost everything in about 7 hours. Very replayable too!

This feels a bit familiar...

My only nitpicks for this game is that most of the perks you can equip are overshadowed and I barely used any of the new EX moves unlocked after defeating a boss stage. That last one might be just me though.

Go Play It!

This blog really sounds like an AD for this game, and I don’t really care.

I really liked it and I can’t wait to play the sequel next year!

I only learned of this game’s existence through a random Youtube recommendation on my feed about the trailer for the sequel. I went to check out the first game, only to be met with the “100% Off” sale tag. I had to check it out!

It felt like actual ROBBERY to get this for free!

(To repent for my actions of getting this game for free, I decided to buy the OST on Bandicamp.)

(The Deltarune Fanfic is the next blog!)

(Post blog edit: My dumbass confused EN with EX, they are EX moves not EN.)

(Post-Post blog edit: I'M EVEN MORE DUMB, IT'S EN NOT EX! EN MOVES, NOT "EX"!!!)