Some battles are always going to end in defeat no matter how much effort goes into fighting back. The enemy is unlimited and vicious, and the closest thing to victory is surviving another minute against overwhelming odds. The monsters just keep coming, slowly but relentlessly getting meaner over time, and while each new upgrade puts the odds a little closer to even again there’s no winning a war of endless attrition. That doesn’t mean the journey down to inevitable defeat can’t be a good time, though.
Less Thinking More Shooting
Viscera is a twin-stick shooter against insurmountable odds, where the goal isn’t survival but rather seeing how far and how powerful you may get before the horde finally overwhelms you. Each run is an arena challenge where the monsters stream in and you need to grab a suitable weapon and all the glowy powerups available to clear some space to maneuver. Once you get a weapon it’s got unlimited ammo, although they all have varying fire rates and reload times, and a good part of the fun is figuring out to use them best. The crossbow, for example, has a slow firing rate but pierces through strings of enemies, splattering them all in a single shot. The slugger, on the other hand, does a lot of damage to a single enemy, which when coupled with its mid-speed firing rate makes it not all that useful against a horde.
Horde-Shooter Rising Heat Demo Ascends to Steam
Rising Heat is an arena shooter that almost feels like it could fall into the Survivors genre but requires a bit more active play than that.
The weapon unlock system, however, justifies using the junk weapons to unlock their more powerful versions, which can be a lot more effective. The bouncing saw-blades (which mercifully do not cause the player damage, unlike most games of this type) aren’t all that great shot out of a lower-tier weapon, but a saw-blade minigun is a whole other beast entirely. The goals to unlock weapons are fairly straightforward- Deal X amount of damage, use for Y period of time, and occasionally with sub-goals like don’t overheat the laser or take any damage while wielding the gravity gun, but other than a few of the fancier weapons it doesn’t take long to have a nice, deadly arsenal.
It’s all random drops, though, so no promises of getting what you want, unless the right level-up ability appears. While Viscera isn’t a Survivors-style game it does use the “pick a random power-up every level” method of upgrading, and there’s a nice variety in there including enhanced luck (always go for luck, it means more drops), minimize damage, shoot faster, and weirder ones like “get really good with the weapon you’re holding but no others will drop”, or “50/50 chance for a huge payout or instant death”. One of them, though, lets you pick any weapon you’ve unlocked, and getting an instant plasma minigun can make any run a little nicer.
Viscera released on Steam today and it’s a fantastically solid arcade shooter. Granted, the contrast between enemy and arena color could be sharper, because the critters can get lost in the level details a little too easily, but when time dilation, ultra-powered shots, and a massive explosion all chain together from random pickups to turn the battlefield into a fountain of gore that doesn’t seem so bad. Viscera isn’t messing around with delivering its twin-stick carnage, and while the end is always going to be defeat it’s going to take a few thousand splattered creatures to take you down.
