Reign of Bullets is a great little shooter with customization and a good progression system. The game isn't completely without flaws, but I think that I've enjoyed it much more than many other things I've played recently, and the simplicity of its core gameplay added to the complexity that can stack upon it via its many systems create an experience that while a bit reminiscent of old flash game, is totally fun to play.
Framed as a story of a guy going on a rampage against a corporation because they built a highway through their garage - all presented as fake tweets - RoB is a game where you go through levels to shoot ships in order to find guns and gears to buy upgrades for your guns and your ship. Using these upgrades, you're ready to shoot higher level enemies to get better upgrades and better guns, the loop goes on until you've defeated the 'final boss', then you unlock a survival mode with checkpoints each five levels. Levels are based on a timer; you just need to kill waves of enemies for a set period of time, it's an interesting idea.
For finishing a level, you get rewards - and you can find items on destroyed enemies as well - in the form of cash, new guns and gun upgrades. You can equip a number of guns on your ship based on a stat you can upgrade with cash, and there are quite a few type of special guns; Blasters, rocket launchers, lasers, flamethrowers... One of the weak points of the game is that some guns feel really useless and I never used them. The game should tell you better how guns 'work'. For instance, there are guns that shoot drones, but I'm really unsure that I ever saw how they damaged enemies. Guns have tiers of rarity and the rarer ones have special properties.
You can upgrade them in many ways, raw damage, piercing, number of projectiles shot, etc. This means you can more or less create the guns that work how you want. Lasers that split, multi-rockets that home on enemies, the list goes on. For your ship, besides weapon slots, you can upgrade your health, the damage of your default weapon, and a few other things. The interface to upgrade, equip and view your guns and ship is a bit clunky, I wish it would've been easier to navigate. I still used the same weapon types on all my slots, but finding better gear led me to at least try everything once.
For the game proper, it works fine with the mouse, hold left click to shoot, right click to become invulnerable and destroy everything for a short while. The game becomes bullet hellish quite quickly and it might be a bit difficult to figure out where your bullets are and what's dangerous on screen. Maybe it should've been easier to follow, maybe with some kind of color coding, because as-is, some scenes are too hectic for me to figure out anything and I survive mostly on luck. The boss fights are okay, but they're a bit tough in that survival mode.
I really liked Reign of Bullets! I've played it for multiple hours and only the call of a new game to review made me uninstall it after getting to round 80-something of the survival mode. There are multiple difficulty settings with tougher enemies and better loot, so I could've went that way if I had kept playing!
