SNKRX
Pronounced SnakeRX(?) is a relatively simple arena shooter. It has run based roguelike elements, run defining items and notably auto chess synergy mechanics.
You build a snake out of individual dots from a randomized shop and fight in various short wave-based challenges. There are a number of enemy types and minor tactics for the fights. You spend gold on units for your snake, upgrading the shop and upgrading items.
Your snake parts have individual skills and 1-3 classes. A scout throws a knife that chains to two secondary targets. The scout’s university degree is rogue. If you combine it with two other rogues in your snake, like a beast master who creates critters when it crits and a jester who makes killed enemies explode into more knives, all rogues get a 15% crit chance.
Buying three of the same unit upgrades the unit to tier two, doubling health and damage. Getting three tier two units of the same one (nine basic instances) gives them a unit specific special power on top.
The dev is very actively updating and expanding the game. Balance is kind of wonky in parts and things change a lot.
My friend wrote about it a month ago and for a couple of quid it’s a really interesting little action game, very tough and runs are short enough for quick sessions. It’s changed a lot even in the last week or two since I started playing it. Lots of quality of life improvements and other tweaks.
I’ve reached NG+2 but struggling to get to the 20s. The recent update changed the blue enemies so their attack has a delay which is much fairer and enjoyable to try and avoid. There are some really cool classes and combos. Still experimenting on that front though!
What a lovely little game, and so well made (with the exception that there doesn’t seem to be a way to exit the game…).
I just bought it after seeing the recommendation in the indie games thread and tried a quick run with my son watching. He’s now the proud owner of his own copy. :) He absolutely loves to theorycraft so he’s going to have a great time experimenting with all the possible builds.
My run ended because I was left with only a beastmaster vs an enemy that shoots. It was pretty difficult to time things correctly such that I’d be close enough to the enemy for the beastmaster’s attack to proc while still dodging incoming fire. He got me this time, but already I’m thinking about my build for the next run.
I think that’s due to a recent update to address an exploit.
Don’t know if “the solution” is intentional or not but the esc menu now only works while in the arena phase.
It’s deceptively deep. As Therlun explained, there’s a large number of units you can recruit and they all fall into one (or more) classes, with various abilities synergising between them. Coupled with the classic roguelike element of stopping at the shop between fights and deciding which new units to buy, your priorities list for levelling up the units you have, whether to lock the selection or pay to reroll and all that good stuff, there’s plenty to sink your teeth into.
It’s true that the actual gameplay amounts to little more than steering your snake left and right, but all the systems that surround it make it an incredibly engaging and replayable game. Easily the best two quid I’ll spend this year!
It saves the run, and actually puts you back in the shop just before you started.
It’s a change introduced in the last update to (somewhat clumsily I’d say) address a bug from quitting in the shop.
The esc menu does have some useful quality of life options as well. You can disable screenshake and put an arrow at the front of your snake to make movement more clear for instance.
The Dev keeps releasing updates with lots of content and balancing. The latter of which is still all over the place. I found the game to be much harder in the last week’s version for instance.
Yeah I had to stop playing because it was shifting around too much, despite enjoying it. It feels like it’s in Early Access and I’ve got more stable games to be playing in the meantime! My friend did a follow-up to his initial impressions covering this:
I avoid Early Access as I prefer to judge a game when it’s capital-D Done but I got royally Trojan Horsed: SNKRX twists into a different shape each week, behaving just like an early access title.
Got it last week based on the recommendation here and have been enjoying the game quite a bit so far. And at 2 bucks, it was a no-brainer anyway. Nice and simple core loop that is executed well.
I don’t mind the minimalist visuals, but there definitely need to be a tweak or two to improve the readability in specific situations. Sometimes it’s easy to miss a bomb left behind one of the blue enemies. And I’m pretty sure there’s occasionally an enemy spawn point I steered my ‘party’ into because I missed the red warning cross - or it wasn’t displayed. The engineer turrets having the same shape as the enemies and a color similar to a specific enemy type (orange) isn’t helping either.
That said, all this is stuff that I’m sure will be addressed with updates to come anyway.
I remember only a few weeks ago when there were no blue bombs and the blue enemies just exploded immediately and without warning. They could unceremoniously end a run! The blue bomb tweak is one of my favourite changes.
The colour scheme is one of the more problematic elements of the game for me. Between the classes overlap, projectiles and enemy types it can get confusing at times.
