Action roguelites continue to spawn like tadpoles, and so long as they have an interesting spin, I’m not complaining (yet). Super Shapeshooter brings a gambling aspect to your gameplay, as with each new round of enemies, you get to stick with whatever enemy variety and intensity you have been given, or you can increase the round reward payout by adding more enemies into the mix. You don’t know what’s going to be added until you gamble, though, and you may bite off more than you can chew.
The aesthetic of Super Sharepshooter reminds me heavily of SNKRX, and it serves the game well. I thought it might be the same developer at first, it’s that similar! Your triangle has two weapon slots that can be filled, a dodge, and a special ability. You’ll always start off with the peashooter, a single bullet attack with low damage and a fairly quick reload, but once you pass the first wave, you’ll enter the shop. The shop randomly provides three upgrades you can buy. It might be a weapon like a laser, bomb, or spreadshot, and each weapon has its own cooldown, damage, range, knockback, and piercing stats. It might be a special ability like deploying a turret, a shield, a blast radius attack, or a bouncing shuriken. It could also be a number of passive upgrades that impact damage, speed, cooldowns, weapon range, or add damage to your dash ability. There are tons of these, and you can buy and equip up to four. Almost everything has between two and five upgrade levels, but you’ll only get there if you gamble on your skills…
The gamble mechanic shapes the difficulty of Super Shapeshooter, and if you go all in (as I invariably did), it makes boss encounters far easier to deal with compared to the standard waves. Movement is nimble and predictable, and the player gets advanced warning of enemy spawning positions to get out of the way. This is a crucial skill because of one enemy type that turns Super Shapeshooter into a difficult game to win – the bomber. Most enemies take one health point per hit, but bombers take three, and they detonate whenever they get within a kill radius of you. They will kill enemies within their blast radius, which is handy, but if you’ve been unlucky with the gambling and been served a large posse of bombers, they’ll chain reaction and wipe the entire map. This is also where your special abilities can work against you. A turret or a bouncing shuriken may damage or blow up a bomber when you don’t want it to, causing your death in the process.
The whole game is built around risk vs reward, and the bomber is usually the key enemy to balance your risk around. Other pesky ones to deal with are chargers that charge at you, and shielders that protect other enemies. This is where your XP levelling up comes into play. Alongside the shop purchases, your character also levels up. When you do, you can choose between gaining a health point and increasing your max health stat, gaining an additional dodge, or getting some additional money. The money starts at $1, but next time you choose it, you’ll get $2, then $3 and so on. Initially, I thought the dodge felt like a poor choice, but when you’ve got chargers, shielders, bombers, and gunners shooting bullets at you, you’ll need multiple dodges to get yourself out of multiple tight corners. Don’t underestimate escape over health or cash.
Once a run is completed, you can take your earned cash (roughly $1 per round of enemies cleared) and use it in the overarching unlocks shop. You can increase your speed, pickup radius, base damage, fire rate, and cooldown rates. You can also increase the amount of shop rerolls and even burn items from reappearing in a run or exclude them from the game altogether. These rerolls and burns become more important the more you play because Super Shapeshooter has tons of shop options and only three slots per shop roll. As new abilities, weapons, upgrades, and one-off consumables are locked behind completing certain in-game missions, the likelihood of getting exactly what you want reduces as you play more. It does make Super Shapeshooter far more varied and interesting, though, and so many different builds are very valid. That said, I found some of the more powerful weapons far harder to use because their cooldowns are huge. I settled in on spreadshots to mask my accuracy issues!
Super Shapeshooter is perfectly enjoyable as it is now, and more will be added throughout its early access phase. Whilst perhaps some balancing of enemies and weapons may improve the game, I’d advocate for buying this now, as it already gives a complete and satisfying gaming experience. I really like how the game ratchets up the difficulty through your own overestimations of your skill, and then slaps you back down to Earth quickly. I often felt like a frog in a pan of boiling water, not realising that I was wandering into a wave of enemies I’d be overwhelmed trying to fight, but I’d have great fun going down trying. File this one under action roguelites not to skip.
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