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[AlStar]

After a pair of back-to-back runs that got me all the way down to Chamber 5 yesterday (although only into the final boss room once, annoyingly) I feel like I can finally claim to be getting kinda-sorta-decent at this game.

One thing I found is that post Chamber 2 or so, you really want a gun available for room cleaning - something that you can fire a couple times into big groups of mobs or at mini-bosses - preferably something with a good-sized stash of ammo and decent stopping power. Your starting gun can take down regular gunkin without any problems, but when you're going up against enemies who can fill the entire screen with waves of bullets, it really just stops cutting it.

In the round where I made it all the way to the final boss, I was using the "Regular Shotgun" as my room cleaner - which is just as no-frills as the name would imply, but is a really solid weapon. Did not disappoint.

My second run I wasn't able to find anything quite as handy, and ended up switching back and forth between "The Judge" and "Megahand". A charged Megahand will one-shot most enemies, although suffers against anything it can't one-shot, since the charge time is fairly long.

Currently standing at 42/17/6/2/0 boss clears.

[spümpkin]

I'm not sure helmet guy does anything

He does.

Does he do anything if you repeatedly knock his helmet down? Cause that's what I've been doing.

[AlStar]

I'm not sure helmet guy does anything

He does.

Does he do anything if you repeatedly knock his helmet down? Cause that's what I've been doing.

He'll eventually give you an unlock after you rescue him like 4 times.

[Mephansteras]

Ok, so what's Bay 12's take on this game? I have Nuclear Throne and CryptARK for my normal bullet hell/shooting games and have fun with them when I'm in the mood. Never tried binding of Issac because the subject major is a turn off.

I have been watching Jef's twitch Vod of him playing Enter the Gungeon and it looks like it might be fun.

[AlStar]

I really like it. It's tough as all hell and doesn't pull any punches - you will have to get very good at dodging and fighting to make it down to the bottom. However, it's got a good sense of progression too - as long as you can at least beat the first boss, you'll earn credits to unlock new stuff, find quest givers and new shopkeepers, etc.

If I had to level any complaints at it, it would be that on an average run you don't get to see all the cool mixing of passive powers that you get in Isaac (since many of your rewards will be weapons, and the shops prices are high), and on truly horrid runs, you might be fighting a boss (or two!) with nothing but your starting weapon (which is doable, but difficult and boring) because you just never got anything useful.

[Greenbane]

I've heard good things about this, but also that drops are very random, and some runs might be doomed simply because the game isn't giving you enough guns and ammo to cope with the challenge, regardless of player skill.

Seems like a fairly big issue, and reminds me of SOTS The Pit, which had something similar (and it was never fixed). It eventually killed the game for me.

[Jopax]

Yeah, the drops all have a pretty big impact for the most part which means they're not that frequent. It's not too bad but it can be frustrating to go trough two floors without a single drop after you used your first key. Feels like a waste of time since you know you'll just get ground down to dust sooner or later. Plus it gets kinda dull just using your first gun for the entirety of a floor.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm.

Well, for $15 bucks or whatever it sounds like it'll be worth some fun. And watching Jef play has kept my interest up enough. I think I'll pick it up and try it out.

[EnigmaticHat]

Yeah, the drops all have a pretty big impact for the most part which means they're not that frequent. It's not too bad but it can be frustrating to go trough two floors without a single drop after you used your first key. Feels like a waste of time since you know you'll just get ground down to dust sooner or later. Plus it gets kinda dull just using your first gun for the entirety of a floor.

The gameplay flow is kinda annoying.  In Nuclear Throne I feel fine fighting at 1/8 health because I know I can get it back after a round or two.  In Enter the Gungeon if you're at 1/2 heart you might as well just stop playing because it would take 2 or 3 entire floors to heal yourself up (AKA half the game).  You've got way more health than in most bullet hell games (6-7 hits at the start, and it can go up easily) but the health drops are rare and not guaranteed at all.  The result is most runs you get slowly and inevitably bled dry.

The drops and guns are cool, but all over the place in usefulness.  There a bagillion interchangable shotguns, rifles, and pistols, yet most of the desirable guns don't fit into any of those categories.  There's also a lot of heart container drops that honestly feel more like a heal than a max health increase (see: healing takes ridiculously long, if you lose enough health that you would have died without the heart container don't ever expect to see max health ever again).

[Sean Mirrsen]

I find it worthwhile to shoot up every chest I can't open, because sometimes it does give you the chest contents, or a consumable drop, instead of junk or an explosion.

With unique per-gun ammo and passive reloading being a thing, I think no gun is ever truly useless, even if some of the "boring" guns just generally lack character. There could probably be some improvement in adding passive effects to guns, such as small bonuses to "coolness" that improves chances of good room-clear drops, or altering the relative chances of particular items being dropped or available in the shop. Especially on the boring guns, to make them less likely to become vendor trash.

And I feel that health is supposed to be a rarity, otherwise there would not be quite the same emphasis on skill in getting through the game - if you can refill your healthbar easily, getting hit becomes much less of an issue, and this being a bullet-hell roguelike you have to not get hit.

[Mephansteras]

In the few runs I've done (Maybe...6?) I have to say sometimes 'boring' guns are kinda great. Getting an SMG or decent pistol to go along with the more powerful guns gives me something nice to fall back on for clearing the basic rooms.

[EnigmaticHat]

I find it worthwhile to shoot up every chest I can't open, because sometimes it does give you the chest contents, or a consumable drop, instead of junk or an explosion.

With unique per-gun ammo and passive reloading being a thing, I think no gun is ever truly useless, even if some of the "boring" guns just generally lack character. There could probably be some improvement in adding passive effects to guns, such as small bonuses to "coolness" that improves chances of good room-clear drops, or altering the relative chances of particular items being dropped or available in the shop. Especially on the boring guns, to make them less likely to become vendor trash.

And I feel that health is supposed to be a rarity, otherwise there would not be quite the same emphasis on skill in getting through the game - if you can refill your healthbar easily, getting hit becomes much less of an issue, and this being a bullet-hell roguelike you have to not get hit.

I mean yeah its supposed to be but that doesn't make it a good decision.  Its makes every hit frustrating.  The best comparison I can make is to Chivalry (not mechanically, just the experience of taking damage).  You get clipped by a stray arrow in Chivalry, and you're at a huge disadvantage in the next fight you get into, but regening is so slow it takes as much time as respawning and it leaves you vulnerable.  So every time you get hit its just demoralizing.  Same for EtG.  You get hit and its like, I'm not going to fill the heart container again unless I perfect a bunch of rooms.  But if I got hit *here* I'm clearly not going to be perfecting anything *later in the game*.  Its not unbalanced so much as its unfun.

I'm making a list of every permadeath/rougelite game I can think of and like 90% of them have you bounce back to full health relatively quickly after an encounter.  Even Nethack has easy healing.  The only exceptions I can think of are "realistic" games like DF or C:DDA.

I'd much prefer starting with 1-2 heart containers and having health spawn on a per enemy basis, with boss projectiles/minions also having a chance to drop health.  And having the RR steal health like it does everything else.  Per room is just too scarce, to the point of artificial difficulty.  Makes it feel like I have to memorize all the boss patterns to have a chance of winning.

[Sean Mirrsen]

You... kind of do, though. No amount of health will help you if you don't, this is a bullet hell game too. This is a game that gives you everything you need to not get hit, so almost every bit of damage you suffer is your mistake. In effect the game expects you to not get hit, it rewards you for it, so the healthbar is largely just a training-wheels sort of safety net, a buffer for failure that the game gives you to make you improve your skill to get further. The less you get hit, the longer you will last and the further you will go, with healing being relatively scarce and only really guaranteed if you show real skill by beating bosses flawlessly.

In my opinion abundant healing would turn it into just another dual-stick shooter game instead of a roguelike.

[Mephansteras]

Man, this game like trolling me when I play the Marine. I play any of the other characters and I occasionally will get an active item early on. The Hunter and Pilot just grab it, the Convict I have to decide if I like it more than the Molotov. No big deal. But with the Marine I feel like I get an active item almost half the time from the first chest. So I have to either not take the item or ditch the ammo drop because I haven't gotten a gun yet to use it on. Feels like a huge waste every time. Especially since I'd rather have a gun with him than anything else at the start.

[Frumple]

... okay, have been playing a little. Got around to working out how to look at the sound files, which was not as difficult as I thought it would be, initially.

And. There's ~68 different song tracks. Some are fairly close variations of others, and it's only about two hours total (2:15:25 ), but... still. I just want to state for the record that's fairly impressive! Nice chunk of sound for what looks to be about the average length of a full game.