It's a vampire survivors clone on newgrounds and I didn't notice performance issues, which is impressive.

Things I liked: I was addicted to it longer than I'd care to admit. That's how you know you got the fundamentals down pat. It was fun to play.

Things that could be improved: Once you beat the boss you can keep playing, but you don't really have an incentive to do so. The addictive spell you cast kind of breaks.

If you do a Vampire Survivors type game, people will always be drawing comparisons to it, unfortunately. Applied here, in comparison V.S. has: More levels, more characters to choose from, ways to combine power ups into bigger power ups, so greater ways to customize upgrade paths, and flashier bright casino like graphics that make brain go burrr more. So those are all things that could take this to a higher level. Also multiplayer would be cool but I realize that's a TON more work to pull off.

Also, I know it's not the priority in games like this, but story/lore wise you have an interesting concept about this Vincent butler guy protecting a ghost from evil spirits. I kind of would like to know more, like maybe a page on the menu screen or a character description in character select where you can learn more about who these characters are and why they're here. Again, I get these kind of games storyline takes a backseat, but seems kind of random, butler in happy mask protecting a ghost.

Technical issues: Only real thing I saw was that you can upgrade crit rate beyond 100% which I'm assuming doesn't do anything. Maybe remove that as an option once player hits 100% crit rate?

Also, it seems some of the characters are a bit unbalanced. If you do the upgrade path right I found Winry to be more overpowered than the unlockable characters. You just have to crank up attack speed and add power ups that trigger based on times enemies are damaged, like wisps and lightning. Since her attack goes through enemies and hits multiple, it's easy to trigger those multiple times with that.

Enemy explosions on death as a powerup is potentially overpowered as well. You can wipe out a lot of enemies with a chain reaction of explosions.

cool

Fun time waster. Enjoyed it for over 4 hours.
Adding it to my favorite list.

I fuck with the art direction but I find it lacking in comparison to other Bullet Heavens I've played

Hmm, it's a rather decent attempt at a survivors-like game that gets most of the basics down-pat, but nevertheless is let down by technical issues and rather ho-hum bog-standard gameplay.

In terms of technical issues, there were a few weird ones here and there, like how the text is difficult to read, and when you select a power-up on level up, whatever you selected will remain in this selected state once you get another level-up, forcing you to awkwardly click away so you can unselect it and properly preview all the selections. But the most critical one is that the game doesn't properly pause when you enter the level-up screen: your orbital masks will continue to rotate and collide with enemies, and exp gems on the field will decay in real-time, unfairly fading away while you're just trying to view all your options.

Moving away from technicalities, the gameplay just felt rather plain: all you do is cut down a mob of enemies, with no special events, waves, mini-bosses, treasure chests, or anything to shake things up and add a bit of spice. No, all that happens is the enemies get spongier and spongier, becoming an absolute slog, forcing you to unfairly engage in metaprogression to even have a chance of winning, instead of allowing player skill be the determining factor.

I don't want to be too down on it since there is a decent foundation to work from here: the basics of cutting down enemies and building up your power to become a god is present, and the presentation is rather charming. I just think there's still a lot of work to be done to turn this into something special and fun, feeling like an early alpha in its current state.

NOTE: As instructed, I played the downloadable itch.io version for this review.