Impaler: DOOM meets Vampire Survivor | Game Review

This is a game review of the video game Impaler, which can be bought on Steam for ~3 dollars. The game is a retro style FPS with elements that remind you of such games as Vampire Survivor and Brotato.

You can buy the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1573090/Impaler/
Or here: https://www.gog.com/en/game/impaler

▬▬ι══ Timestamps ══ι▬▬
00:00 Intro
00:36 Weapon Showcase
02:40 Enemy Types
02:54 Stage
03:10 Soundtrack
03:22 Pre-Wrapup
03:40 Cons
04:30 Potential improvements
05:19 Conculsion

▬▬ι══ Contact ══ι▬▬
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E-Mail: fo4363bn@anonaddy.me
Session: 05afb6f6e69bb240d6d78b06bec75531a5411d15eb2030bccaae96db4136848b35
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▬▬ι══ Script ══ι▬▬
Impaler could be described as Doom meets Vampire Survivor or in other terms. It's a wave based FPS with a retro look.
The game has a very simple loop. You start a wave, fight a bunch of enemies (which drop money) and complete a side objective to earn a bit more, claim your reward at the end which is either health or 10 coins if you are fully healed and finally start the next wave which before it starts shows you a choice of two upgrades you can buy.
The game has a total of 52 upgrades and 8 primary weapons, which are:
- The Perforator. A little sub machine gun which you can use from the start.
- The Harvester. A Shotgun, which has bullets that ricochet after their initial impact. These bullets however don't seem to do much and the fire rate and damage are lacking.
- The Gustav. A rocket launcher like you will find in doom, quake or other FPS. However rocket jumping is not recommended. It's strong and has a decent fire rate. Overall I would declare it the best weapon. It does have splash damage, but that is really not too hard to avoid.
- The Plasmatech 3000 is a plasma rifle which you get after a total of 1000 kills. It's fast, deals a good amount of damage and has little spread. Overall it's a good choice.
- The Shredder. It looks like an AR and it's name implies it being akin to something like the PPSH from CoD. However it fires slowly and has to cool down after only 8 or 9 shots. I fail to see how it is any different than the Plasmatech.
- The AC 50 is my second favorite weapon. I belive it is supposed to be a railgun. It fires 4 shots quite quickly, deals good damage and is very precise.
- The Boomstick has the look of an iconic weapon and deals damage accordingly, but it simply feels like a reskin of the AC 50 with worse precision.
- The Torment's Edge is a sword that fires 5 projectiles in a horizontal line and is the only weapon that pulls you forward rather than pushing you backwards. It also deals more damage if an enemy is closer to your swing (It could also just be that more of the projectilrs hit when you are closer).
Last up is your secondary weapon. A staff that summons spikes from the ground impaling your enemies. The spikes are a fine weapon that are summoned quite quickly, but fail to reach or even damage some enemies.
Primary weapons are only used for damage, but any secondary damage. Be it your spikes, a saw on the ground, explosions, etc. will prompt enemies to also drop health, which is a crucial component to a successful run.
Impaler presents you with a handful of enemy types. Melee types that attack you from close up, shooting types and stationary types. Later on rather than getting new enemies you just get larger ones, which are stronger, but other than their size have barely any differences.
The Stage is one elongated room which starts of empty, but gains various obstacles the further you get, which gives the player new ways to hide from enemies and missuse them to their advantage. Such as using pillars to wall jump high into the air to do stomping attacks.
The soundtrack is nice and reminds me a little of castlevania. It is however nothing ground breaking and could use some spice or mix ups based on factors like current health, weapon, wave, etc.
Impaler is all in all a simple game that does not insare its player into playing it for hours to get anywhere. The rounds are fairly quick and an entire Run shouldn't take too long either. It also helps that the price isn't too steep.
The Various choices of upgrades allows the player to alter a run slightly which gives the game a slight strategic edge.
However there are a bunch of things I personally have to criticize:
All the weapons use the "overheating" system, rather than reloading or just firing forever. This is a good idea, but it's done very poorly. Every weapon overheats too quickly and rather than having a satisfying reload animation, you wait for a bar to deplete. It doesn't help that the weapon animations themselves are non-existent, which makes them not only feel weak, but also makes them look weak.
The stage itself is rather boring and the obstacles are nice, but don't help with the stage feeling flat.
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