That last bit is for Doomsday Hunters, the new roguelike isometric action game from tiny 2-person indie studio Moregames. Doomsday Hunters takes the standard action isometric formula you’re used to and amps things up to 11. You’re being treated to a new standard roguelikes here with lots of humor, huge, ridiculous explosions, an abundance of insane weapons and a wide variety of levels. In Doomsday Hunters, you play a Hunter in a post-apocalyptic Earth where nothing is as it seems, humans are about to become extinct, and your doom is all but assured. The whole planet is covered in monsters, dangerous robots, and even aliens and it’s up to you to stop…um…Dracula. Well, let’s let you find out more about that on your own.
Regardless of the plot, the focus here is gameplay, gameplay, gameplay. Initially you start with a single playable character, but as you progress, you’ll unlock a number of different options. Doomsday Hunters features permanent upgrades in addition to the stuff you earn on each run so as you play, the enemy repertoire, weapons, and playable characters slowly expand, leaving you with a much larger and more varied experience playthrough by playthrough. Unlike other games in the genre though, this is one where it feels like you’re not just making incremental progress but actually getting somewhere even when you do die.
Depending on your skill level, death will come frequently too. Your early weapons are fairly weak and your special weapons have limited ammo, forcing you to fight to the death. Each level is a series of islands surrounded by toxic sludge, lava, and other hazards too, forcing you to wade right into combat whether you like it or not. Your trusty sidearm (you get better ones eventually) is the only weapon that has infinite ammo, but even that requires reloading, so expect to do a lot of backpedalling!
Fortunately, the combat is deliriously fun in Doomsday Hunters. Enemies will mass you, explode into piles of twitching goo, lose heads and torsos, and just keep coming! Half of the fun is surviving a wave of particularly vicious enemies and earning a reward crate that gives you a new gun or skill, letting you just squeak by on the next island. There are plenty of other interesting things going on here as well. In addition to a variety of weapons, you can pick specialties at the beginning of each run. During gameplay you can choose to scrap loot crates and rescue merchants and other beings in order to get special coins that allow you to gain permanent upgrades in the starting area as well. Once you manage to beat the game, you unlock the next level of difficulty (6 in all) and you can choose which level to play at. To truly beat the game you’ll have to beat all six of course, but it’s fun no matter what.
The vast array of weapons and upgrades is what makes Doomsday Hunters really compelling. You start out with a handgun and a laser but you can get rocket launchers, 5 way shots, weird grapple weapons, special weapons that drop the head of the Statue of Liberty on enemies and so much more. There are a number of sub-areas hidden in levels too, allowing you to play different styles of gameplay including de-rezzed graphics and even a platforming coin collecting minigame. With procedurally generated levels, there’s not a lot of repetition here and the game feels fresh with every run.
There are also bosses in every level and the bosses are massive, excellent things that feel like they wouldn’t be out of place in a bullet hell shmup. Bullets, fireballs, and rockets are flying everywhere and dodging at least most of them will keep you alive long enough to prevail. Unfortunately for you, your health doesn’t regenerate so you’d better hope there are some health stations and you can buy some health boosts because healing is not particularly common. You’ll occasionally get a health drop from enemies and some civilians offer health (but then you can’t save them for upgrade coins) but by and large, you’d better try not to get hit.
If you’re a tenacious player, Doomsday Hunters won’t be too challenging at first. During the course of this review, the first loop took about three runs to reach the end of and by that time, the main character was so overpowered it was ridiculous. Grab enough stuff, add enough weapon mods and character modifications and you’ll be an unstoppable killing machine. Of course beating the game unlocked a host of new, more difficult enemies and forced us back to the beginning for another, more challenging loop, but as roguelikes go, Doomsday Hunters is noticeably accessible and becomes more so as you play. It does take a little while to get used to conserving special weapon ammo however. There are over a thousand different weapons in the game and just grabbing new ones willy-nilly means that sometimes you’re stuck with something you don’t like or that doesn’t fit your playstyle so try ‘em out before you scrap your old weapon. DPS isn’t everything after all!
Speaking of weapons (and there’s a lot), it pays to pay attention to all the stats. Sometimes you can see if your weapon is weaker than the one that is available, sometimes not. But what you also have to note is whether it’s rarer and more powerful or not. Overpowered ultra-rare weapons often have reduced range or accuracy and that has an impact on how easy it is to fight off a horde of radioactive zombies and killer robots. You can mitigate the accuracy problems with character upgrades but grabbing the wrong weapon definitely has consequences. The same goes for investigating random interaction points in the environment. Sometimes they’ll just curse you, negatively affecting your stats and abilities or boosting enemy speed or skills. Other times, things will explode, spray toxic gas, or poison you for bumping into them or shooting them. On a desolate post-apocalyptic Earth, everything is out to get you.
By now you’ve probably noticed the visuals in Doomsday Hunters as well. The graphic design here is absolutely peak vintage retro style and not only do the characters and enemies look awesome but the environments are gloriously detailed. Moving from environment to environment is a joy and with each level being relatively short depending on your skills, you get to experience a wide variety of scenery. The enemy models are wild too, with gory explosions of flesh, pulsing nodules and heads, and a ton of incredibly unexpected attacks. You just never know what’s going to happen in Doomsday Hunters and that’s fun, especially when everything looks so cool! Just wait until the first nuke goes off…
The sound is also excellent here. While Doomsday Hunters doesn’t have a soundtrack that will have you racing out to buy it on Bandcamp, the background music is solid and the focus is on the sound effects here. They’re great too of course, with squishy weirdness everywhere, a near-constant barrage of gunfire and laser sounds, and all of it clear and enjoyable. For a game with this much going on, you wouldn’t expect the audio distinction between weapons that you get here but each style of seems to have its own sound and the overall effect is a barrage of gunfire, impacts, and monster attacks. Oh, and explosions. Who can forget those??
It’s legitimately hard to come up with any real criticism of Doomsday Hunters. One run, I died and didn’t seem to get any experience but I’m not sure what happened and it was never replicated. There are no glitches, load times are fast, gameplay is fun, there’s a ton of variety, and you even have options to modify the gameplay for a variety of different world-rules in case you feel like things are getting stale. It genuinely seems like Moregames has thought of everything here and after a few runs, the controls and world are going to feel natural, you’ll have a handful of alternative characters to try out with more on the way, and there’s pretty much no question you’re going to keep coming back for more. It’s been a long time since we saw an indie roguelike that was this addictive and fun and Doomsday Hunters is definitely on its way to being noticed! For a game that only costs $18, you’re going to get a lot of hours out of this one and honestly, there needs to be a physical release of the game because this is one title that deserves to be on a cart!
This review is based on a digital copy of Doomsday Hunters provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Doomsday Hunters is also available for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.