Radio Viscera

If you're using doors instead of blasting through walls, you're doing it wrong. It's a nice take on a twin stick shooter where you can't kill or defeat things by shooting at them, but instead shooting them *into* things.
I love all the glitchy visual effects. Game is very light on story and humour is definitely very weird, but I'm liking it so far.

Some great stuff, but far from perfect.
- Aesthetic is great, and it is *super* impressive that this was made by one guy (mostly? entirely?).
- The plot is silly, and the corporate satire is far from new, but the game is having fun with it and so am I. :)
- I really wanted to love this, and I have definitely had some fun with it, but I so far have found myself getting more and more frustrated as I go. It might be one of those games that 'clicks' the second or third time you boot it up, and I can tell it's a labor of love and it does a lot right.
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- **Major Gripe: CHECKPOINTS** -- game kills it's own momentum a lot, as the checkpoints are *really* spaced out, despite some places where it's really easy to walk too close to a hazard (or stumble into one of the hidden ones). In my experience you'll most often die to a hazard, as it's pretty easy to kill the bads and get HP back before they three-tap you. My first two deaths were walking into a previously unintroduced acid pit that opens up if you walk over some metal panels on the ground. The Checkpoint was so far away that I had forgotten what killed me when I got there and immediately did the same thing again. I wouldn't be bothered by that design at all IF the pit had been introduced (it's really easy to not launch anyone over there during that fight) or if there had been a checkpoint that wasn't ~5 minutes away. As it is, there have been a lot of times where I've had to trudge through the same easy fights a few times because I made a half-second mistake near a hazard; a mistake that, were there more frequent checkpoints, would have made me laugh instead of groan).
- **Hazards were a huge selling point for me, but a bit of a let down in-game.** They would have been more interesting if they did more than just gib. Some silly sadism with acid pits and spikes and stuff sounded great, but they all feel like the same hazard (and I've always thought gibbing was actually kinda boring anyway). :(
- **I thought the controls were fine on mouse and keyboard (just click on what you want to shoot) but I can see why people have mentioned them negatively due to other aspects of the game.**The game is sortof-but-not-quite-orthagonal, in that every pathway is blocked out in 45 and 90 degree angles, but if you try to walk diagonally with WASD (so, W+D, for isntance), your movement angle won't *quite* match up with the world; so, if you're on a narrow bridge that's on a diagonal, you can't just hold two arrow keys and make it work, you have to keep adjusting as you go or you'll fall off. That's not an issue on a controller (or a super big one anyway, so far), but it's a minor catch-22 as aiming with a mouse is much easier. The camera can also make things hard sometimes, but it's generally good at being where it needs to be.
- **Score resets when you die. Oof.** :s
Especially spicy since you need 6-digit scores to unlock stuff, so if you die anywhere beyond the first room or two you have pretty much no chance of getting that (as far as I can tell). They seem to be just cosmetic awards though, so that doesn't bother me much, but it is still a super punishing way of handling score. If you really know the levels I guess it's fine? You'd need to anyway, as pathfinding is often really tricky (and the radar pointer seems to not always be accurate, pointing you in the opposite direction) so you'll often lose your multipliers before you find the next fight if you can't immediately pick the right route. Again, only a gripe if you care about score, and so far I haven't had enough reason to to really be bothered.
- **Pathfinding is prety tricky sometimes, even with the radar.** Example: giant launching button that has never been introduced before that is facing away from the camera and not highlighted (say, by lighting) to suggest it is important. I've spent a decent amount of time wandering and backtracking so far, especially the further I get into the game, and had a lot of "oh thank god" moments when the battle music starts up again. Also had a bug out where I couldn't progress for a bit; was told to 'start a fire in the explosive gas room', but the radar is pointing me directly towards a sealed door; it turned out I had accidentally entered a room too early and had to backtrack to another path that was the opposite direction of the arrow, blow up some stuff, and *then* go to that door.
- I've hit a few bugs, like another of those giant launching buttons that seemed important to my next objective (near the drill in the second level), but when you walk into it you clip through and fall out of the map. Thankfully, this is just after a checkpoint, otherwise it would have been quite frustrating.
- Some other...interesting choices. So, the first Mutator you unlock (assuming it's not random) is "instagib," which is effectively "ignore the game's core mechanic." Honestly, I turned it on because it didn't feel *that* different from the hazards anyway, and some of the rooms are somewhat stingy with them which can slow things down a bit, but it's definitely not the way the game was intended to be played either. I guess it's a nice relief-valve if you're not a fan of required hazards, though I wish there was a middle ground between "only hazards kill" and "gun instead of hazards".
- The Highlights (save a gif) feature is an awesome idea, but it never seems to select your high-score moments; at the end of each level so far I've only ever seen a 1-2 kill gif, despite having wiped a few rooms with rapid multikills. I'd think that it's picking highest scoring moments, but it definitely doesn't seem like that's actually what's going on (how could the first kill walking in a new room with a low multiplier be higher scoring than killing the next five enemies in that same room?).
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So, after all that, why am I recommending this?
Honestly, I felt that some of this feedback was important for people to see, so I wanted to add early-impressions to the page while the game was still new, but I acknowledge that I still don’t have that long in the game and later stages might bring more to the table. Hell, even with just some more time it will probably grow on me, and those initial frustrations might fade.
Further, I know that this is a small-scale, indie production, and a lot of impressive stuff is on display here –even despite my gripes, I just couldn’t bring myself to add a “not recommended” to the small number of reviews currently on the page, especially when it’s the notes above that

An interesting table top game which has the potential to be an incredibly skill-full masterclass!
However, even after a while, i found this to be incredibly grinding and frustrating. Aiming with a controller is incredibly difficult making the game play and shooting clumsy. Level design is wonderful and the amount of things you can destroy can make your mind wander. But the lack of variety of events to kill the enemies was lacklustre and samey.
I would understand more things could open up further in the game... But for the amount of time played and how far i got, it was disappointing.
TLDR: Great game with huge potential, difficult to control.

This is a very tentative thumbs up because the game is decent fun, but it's marred by technical issues (walls with no collision detection, sound bugs, black frames) and a couple gameplay flaws (the camera). Here's hoping future patches address some of these concerns.

liking this neat little indie game so far:
its got a fun sense of humor and some silly physics based / grav gun combat, and a loop with a lot of potential, with only a few bugs ran into so far
biggest caveat is the camera is mad disorienting, occasionally motion sickness inducing, and personally I can't play this game for more than 20 minutes at a time. Despite this I still like it and think its pretty good, not at all deserving of the "mixed" review status its got (which honestly is super confusing! I can only find like 2 or 3 negative reviews, scrolling to the bottom says 87% of user reviews are positive? and I scrolled through all 36 curator reviews and couldn't find anything negative, steam is doing this game dirty)

I don't know if I understand the bad reviews on this, the game is a lot of fun! The controls and movement are clean and simple, only a move, jump, and shoot button. The only thing that I had trouble with is that the aiming is a little weird, it seems to auto-aim at enemies on controller, which can cause problems when you're trying to shoot the right ones.
But anyways! The core gameplay of finding a killing source and positioning yourself to shoot enemies in it is so much fun. I've only seen 2 enemy types 5 levels in but that's enough for me, there doesn't need to be anything more. There's an ample mix of both exploring some expansive indoor spaces and combat. The enemies can get overwhelming if you let them build up. The game sort of offers a choice in this way of trying to kill every enemy that pops up or running away from them, to find a place where they won't go after you, and I did a little bit of both strategies.
The story and humor are alright, it's very lighthearted, but definitely doesn't carry the game by any means.
I haven't played through all of it, but I have a feeling the rest of the game will be more of the same, which is perfectly okay with me. It never gets old chucking enemies into kill areas!

Wacky game for sure but it needs more weapons and abilities early on cause I kinda lost interest. Also the level design isn't the best especially for exploration to the point where I wasn't going for any collectibles at all.