Doomsday Hunters Review

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Fast Facts

Imagine

One can only begin to imagine what it’s like to release your game into the wild for the first time. The anticipation. The nervousness. The relief. Then, you wait for the validation. The understanding. The reception. 

Now, imagine releasing a game after nine years of development. Toiling away on a game for all that time. How many iterations? Design choices? Scrapped game mechanics? Knowing when to call it a day and commit wholeheartedly to what has been created must be difficult. 

Now, imagine all of that, and then smashing it out of the park. The game sticks the landing. It hits the right notes. It was worth it. 

That’s Doomsday Hunters. 

Developed and published by Moregames, Doomsday Hunters is a twin-stick, rogue-lite shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world where a cataclysmic event means Earth no longer exists. Instead, it has been replaced with a world full of altered physics and populated by monsters, demons, aliens, and crazy robots. Although a rather elaborate plot, it serves more as a way to build a world in which the mechanics can flourish, and it does that extremely well. 

Sharing similarities with the likes of Hades and Enter the Gungeon can be both a blessing and a curse, yet Doomsday Hunters wears it well. You travel from island to island defeating monsters and searching for loot – namely weapons, modifiers, and items. Once you arrive at one of the many small islands in that world, you must defeat all of the enemies on there before you can navigate across to the next. Each island acts like a room – not dissimilar to those found in The Binding of Isaac – and it’s this that contributes to its rather beautiful pick-up-and-play nature. 

Risk Versus Reward

Where games of this ilk can often falter is in the mechanics that sit behind the design. In the case of Doomsday Hunters, the risk versus reward element is so strong that you can’t help but enjoy discovering the fruits of your labour. Should I lose 30% of my max HP in order to gain 3 lives, or should I improve my speed and damage by 20%? Decisions like this are made frequently, and they keep momentum building as you make your way to the boss of that land. 

Enemy design is great throughout, with a wide variety of different types ranging from bullet-hell missiles to close-quarters combat. On occasion, it can get frustrating to see the same difficult enemies appear multiple times in quick succession, but there’s a lot of thought that has gone into the make-up of each enemy. The same can be said for the playable characters. 

Modify and Manipulate

As you complete repeat runs, you earn XP and go through the ranks. When you level up, you unlock new enemy types, weapons, and characters you can play as. These are well-balanced, offering different playstyles and perks to suit many preferences. 

Upon starting a run, you can select from several different worlds, each increasing in difficulty i.e. enemies have 10% extra HP and deliver 10% more damage. You gain more by challenging yourself in the later worlds, but it’s nice to sometimes go back to an easier world just to enjoy running and gunning on each island. 

There are other options available to you too. You can spend Meta coins to gain upgrades across 8 different skill trees. You can also select your class for that run and receive the respective perks as a result. There’s a shop where you can spend some of your points on new weapons and the like. And, a personal favourite of mine – you can apply modifiers to make the game easier or more challenging. From changing time flow to max HP or even the camera angle, there are lots of different ways to mix things up in this game. 

Depth and Detail

It is clear that players are benefiting from the 9 years of development where gameplay is concerned, and this remains the case for the visuals too. There’s a fantastic depth to the pixel art world, with weaponry, items, and foliage showcasing attention to detail. The boss battles are where it really shines, with brilliant enemy design and a sense of chaos that the game handles really well. 

Complimenting the sights are some wonderful sounds. The soundtrack is atmospheric and upbeat, with the occasional sense of foreboding that builds and builds. It’s yet another example of vision and direction being fully realised by a committed and talented developer. 

Hunting Down Perfection 

For all that Doomsday Hunters delivers, there are just two areas that hold it back from being a proper cult classic. Firstly, it can feel repetitive. Due to its rogue-lite nature, you do find yourself coming up against the same enemies time and again. This can become tiresome, and you can find yourself rushing from area to area just to get somewhere different. 

Coinciding with this feeling of repetition is the level of challenge or difficulty. On occasion, Doomsday Hunters can prove quite unforgiving – especially in the later worlds. When coupled with the chance that you may face frustrating enemies across multiple islands in quick succession, it can end a run rather abruptly with no choice but to go back and do it all again. Its gameplay is moreish, but not to the point you can forgive any feeling of frustration straight away. 

Doomsday Hunters is A LOT of fun. It stays true to its design and delivers a mechanically strong twin-stick rogue-lite that, whilst not necessarily offering anything new, manages to go toe-to-toe with the greats in the genre.  

Rapid Reviews Rating

4 out of 5

4

You can purchase Doomsday Hunters on the Nintendo eShop here.