Do you, reader, like Vampire survivor? Do you want even more chaos? Bigger hordes of enemies that literally climb upon each other to make a chaotic tower in their desperate attempt to crush you? Then this chaotically addicting game, comically called MEGABONK, might just be for you.
MEGABONK wants to bring the rogue-lite horde survival genre into the third dimension with a good dose of Risk of Rain and memes thrown into the mix. This game came out of literally nowhere and has become an unexpected hit for the year. Lets dive right in and find out why.
Gameplay:
Were you expecting a story segment like my usual reviews? To put it bluntly, MEGABONK isn't a story driven game; it doesn't even pretend to have a semblance of a story. This is a purely chaotic game where the characters, weapons, and even the items were added most likely because the developer thought it would be funny and fun to use. Before we go into details about that, lets go over what the game is actually about:
As stated MEGABONK takes heavy inspiration from Vampire Survivors, which is a horde survival rogue-lite. Unlike its inspiration, however, this is a low-poly 3D game! As you start a stage, you can run around, jump, and slide down slopes for extra speed. Your main weapon will automatically be attacking in set intervals. Depending on the weapon, you may have to aim it, or it will seek out targets by itself. Meanwhile, there will be a constant barrage of enemies trying to walk up to you to take you down.
Its starts fairly simple with only a few enemies at a time, but as the timer of the stage is going down, more and more enemies will spawn in. Eventually, there will be a Swarm, which spawns a HUGE amount of enemies in an attempt to overwhelm you! If that wasn't bad enough, you will also meet bosses as the timer goes down.
Before timer runs out, you want to find the end stage portal. This will not only spawn the stage boss, but will also allow you to go to next stage directly (if you have it unlocked).
However, there is a way to upgrade your bonking power. While killing the enemies, they will drop experience shards that will fill up a bar to level you up. Not only does a level-up increase your base stats, but it also gives you different choices: you could level up your current weapon, you can gain a whole new weapon (which you will be able to also level up after acquiring it), or you can get a tome, which boosts a passive stat. For example: armor (which makes you tanky), damage (very self-explanatory), Luck (which increases the likelihood of obtaining better rewards), etc.
The different characters you unlock have different weapons they start with, and different passives that can drastically change your approach to which weapons or tomes you pick up. For example, the two starting characters are Fox and Sir Oofie. Fox gains more Luck as he levels up, which helps you get better rolls on upgrades and items. Sir Oofie gains more armor, which makes you survive a lot longer than most characters, the trade-off is that he is a slower character.
You can only have a set amount of weapons or tomes starting out, and after selecting the ones you want, you wont be able to change them out during a run. You've got to make your choices carefully! As you level up, your upgrades can have different rolls ranging from Common up to Legendary; naturally, the higher the rarity, the better the stats you roll. This creates a lot of decision-making once you level up and can make or break a run fully, depending on your Luck stat.
However, there are other ways to also increase your bonking power! Spread throughout the map are chests, which you can either find a golden variant of that is free to open or have to pay gold that you generate passively as you kill monsters. In these chests, you obtain items which can give you all from passive stats or straight-up new types of damage! Need Power? Items like Moldy Cheese (yes really) turn your bonks into poisonous strikes, and a Battery increases the frequency of your attacks. The game isn't just about leveling up; it's about engineering a cataclysmic, screen-filling spectacle that shouldn't be possible.
With these two ways to power-up, MEGABONK doesn't just allow game-breaking builds, it hands you the blueprints and dares you to ignite the chaos. I am not joking, reader, this game not only allows the pure chaos with your build going out of control, it fully embraces it and taunts you to try harder next run.
There are ways to help you control the chaos. After a few runs, you will unlock the Shop, where you can spend your hard earned Silver coins (which also passively generate throughout a run, in particular if you beat a stage). Silver coins are used to unlock everything from characters to new items and weapons, with the Shop, though, you can unlock permanent upgrades such as: more weapon and tome slots, more refreshes that you can use to reroll upgrades or even items, banishes to make sure that items can't appear anymore on your run, and skips which allows you to skip a level if you really don't like the rolls you got.
With the help of these tools, the RNG of drops doesn't feel as bad or as random as one can imagine. More often than not, you will be able to get what you want with some smart decision-making. It honestly makes it more fun and skill-based than I initially thought.
At the end of a run or if the timer runs out, you face the Final swarm. It is an endless wave of enemies that overtime gain more power and speed, trying to take you down fully! The longer you manage to stay alive, the more silver you will gain, and you will also be able to get a final kill score which automatically gets put up on leaderboards.
There are even more ways to challenge yourself or upgrade yourself during a run. However, I feel that it would be more fun to allow you, reader, to discover them yourself haha. Remember, press the bush when you see it.
As stated MEGABONK takes heavy inspiration from Vampire Survivors, which is a horde survival rogue-lite. Unlike its inspiration, however, this is a low-poly 3D game! As you start a stage, you can run around, jump, and slide down slopes for extra speed. Your main weapon will automatically be attacking in set intervals. Depending on the weapon, you may have to aim it, or it will seek out targets by itself. Meanwhile, there will be a constant barrage of enemies trying to walk up to you to take you down.
Its starts fairly simple with only a few enemies at a time, but as the timer of the stage is going down, more and more enemies will spawn in. Eventually, there will be a Swarm, which spawns a HUGE amount of enemies in an attempt to overwhelm you! If that wasn't bad enough, you will also meet bosses as the timer goes down.
Before timer runs out, you want to find the end stage portal. This will not only spawn the stage boss, but will also allow you to go to next stage directly (if you have it unlocked).
However, there is a way to upgrade your bonking power. While killing the enemies, they will drop experience shards that will fill up a bar to level you up. Not only does a level-up increase your base stats, but it also gives you different choices: you could level up your current weapon, you can gain a whole new weapon (which you will be able to also level up after acquiring it), or you can get a tome, which boosts a passive stat. For example: armor (which makes you tanky), damage (very self-explanatory), Luck (which increases the likelihood of obtaining better rewards), etc.
The different characters you unlock have different weapons they start with, and different passives that can drastically change your approach to which weapons or tomes you pick up. For example, the two starting characters are Fox and Sir Oofie. Fox gains more Luck as he levels up, which helps you get better rolls on upgrades and items. Sir Oofie gains more armor, which makes you survive a lot longer than most characters, the trade-off is that he is a slower character.
You can only have a set amount of weapons or tomes starting out, and after selecting the ones you want, you wont be able to change them out during a run. You've got to make your choices carefully! As you level up, your upgrades can have different rolls ranging from Common up to Legendary; naturally, the higher the rarity, the better the stats you roll. This creates a lot of decision-making once you level up and can make or break a run fully, depending on your Luck stat.
However, there are other ways to also increase your bonking power! Spread throughout the map are chests, which you can either find a golden variant of that is free to open or have to pay gold that you generate passively as you kill monsters. In these chests, you obtain items which can give you all from passive stats or straight-up new types of damage! Need Power? Items like Moldy Cheese (yes really) turn your bonks into poisonous strikes, and a Battery increases the frequency of your attacks. The game isn't just about leveling up; it's about engineering a cataclysmic, screen-filling spectacle that shouldn't be possible.
With these two ways to power-up, MEGABONK doesn't just allow game-breaking builds, it hands you the blueprints and dares you to ignite the chaos. I am not joking, reader, this game not only allows the pure chaos with your build going out of control, it fully embraces it and taunts you to try harder next run.
There are ways to help you control the chaos. After a few runs, you will unlock the Shop, where you can spend your hard earned Silver coins (which also passively generate throughout a run, in particular if you beat a stage). Silver coins are used to unlock everything from characters to new items and weapons, with the Shop, though, you can unlock permanent upgrades such as: more weapon and tome slots, more refreshes that you can use to reroll upgrades or even items, banishes to make sure that items can't appear anymore on your run, and skips which allows you to skip a level if you really don't like the rolls you got.
With the help of these tools, the RNG of drops doesn't feel as bad or as random as one can imagine. More often than not, you will be able to get what you want with some smart decision-making. It honestly makes it more fun and skill-based than I initially thought.
At the end of a run or if the timer runs out, you face the Final swarm. It is an endless wave of enemies that overtime gain more power and speed, trying to take you down fully! The longer you manage to stay alive, the more silver you will gain, and you will also be able to get a final kill score which automatically gets put up on leaderboards.
There are even more ways to challenge yourself or upgrade yourself during a run. However, I feel that it would be more fun to allow you, reader, to discover them yourself haha. Remember, press the bush when you see it.
Pros and Cons:
Lets start with the pros: MEGABONK is an absolute chaotic blast to play, there are a ton of unlocks and missions you can do, which will consistently make your runs even crazier and more fun to play.
Every character is varied and different from each other, so it has become a bit of a race between the players to see who can be the best Sir Oofie, or which character is the best overall at the top! With a rotating leaderboard, it genuinely becomes a fun challenge to see how far up you can go, and even if you're not at the very top, the game will tell you at the end of the run how you placed in the world. There is even a separate leaderboard just for your friends, making the friendly competition quite fierce indeed, haha. However, currently it is only these two leaderboards. I hope that we will see things like character specific leaderboards eventually, and other types than just killing the max amount of enemies. Granted, the developer has already confirmed that more leaderboards are on their way.
MEGABONK has a killer soundtrack. It doesn't have any right to have such a good soundtrack with all of them memes and jokes but man. . . I am so glad it has such a good soundtrack, and it makes it into a fairly hype moment during gameplay when your favorite track starts to play. (Just for your information my favorite track is: "BONK ME UP BEFORE YOU GO," and has been uploaded by the composer Miguelangell960, yes all songs are "bonk" named haha).
MEGABONK has a killer soundtrack. It doesn't have any right to have such a good soundtrack with all of them memes and jokes but man. . . I am so glad it has such a good soundtrack, and it makes it into a fairly hype moment during gameplay when your favorite track starts to play. (Just for your information my favorite track is: "BONK ME UP BEFORE YOU GO," and has been uploaded by the composer Miguelangell960, yes all songs are "bonk" named haha).
I love the low-poly look that the game has going for itself. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it is quite charming, and fits the soundtrack too. There is one thing, though, that people will have mixed opinions about, and that is the humor of the game. The humor is pure internet ridiculousness. Characters and items are straight-up memes. You can, for instance, play as Megachad (yes that one).
Personally, I didn't mind any of these jokes, and some of them were quite funny, and just the right kind of ridiculous. Even if you don't get the joke, it never hampered the gameplay or enjoyment of the game. All of them were pretty much added because the developer themselves thought it would not only be funny, but also fun to play with. I would say that is the make-or-break factor when it comes to adding internet humor to your game, and in MEGABONK's case the developer nailed it.
MEGABONK is also a surprisingly skill-based game. What I mean by that, reader, is that there are few hidden mechanics that allow you to gain a lot of speed with any character in the game without any upgrades! If you hold down diagonally your movement and time your jumps as you're about to land, you will start doing classic bunny hops. For those that are not from the fossil age of PC gaming (such as myself), bunny hops are essentially jumps that allow you to keep your momentum and speed up. If you take a look at a skilled player of the game, you will notice that they will be jumping around a lot.
I found this aspect honestly a lot of fun, and it added a good skill ceiling to the game in the sense that, it is easy to learn but hard to master. Mastering it is the difference between surviving and soaring across the map like a physics-defying god. In fact, the controls in general are very smooth; it feels good to play any character. However, because of the RNG element of the game, even if you're not super skilled at bunny hopping (I for sure aren't!), it doesn't feel unfair or un-fun to just play the game normally. There are definitely other ways for you to succeed without all the skills in the world, lets just put it that way.
Personally, I didn't mind any of these jokes, and some of them were quite funny, and just the right kind of ridiculous. Even if you don't get the joke, it never hampered the gameplay or enjoyment of the game. All of them were pretty much added because the developer themselves thought it would not only be funny, but also fun to play with. I would say that is the make-or-break factor when it comes to adding internet humor to your game, and in MEGABONK's case the developer nailed it.
MEGABONK is also a surprisingly skill-based game. What I mean by that, reader, is that there are few hidden mechanics that allow you to gain a lot of speed with any character in the game without any upgrades! If you hold down diagonally your movement and time your jumps as you're about to land, you will start doing classic bunny hops. For those that are not from the fossil age of PC gaming (such as myself), bunny hops are essentially jumps that allow you to keep your momentum and speed up. If you take a look at a skilled player of the game, you will notice that they will be jumping around a lot.
I found this aspect honestly a lot of fun, and it added a good skill ceiling to the game in the sense that, it is easy to learn but hard to master. Mastering it is the difference between surviving and soaring across the map like a physics-defying god. In fact, the controls in general are very smooth; it feels good to play any character. However, because of the RNG element of the game, even if you're not super skilled at bunny hopping (I for sure aren't!), it doesn't feel unfair or un-fun to just play the game normally. There are definitely other ways for you to succeed without all the skills in the world, lets just put it that way.
So what are some of the cons then? Well, for a 1.0 release there is a low amount of stages to play in: just Forest and Desert. Sure, both of them have three stages inside them you can unlock and a final boss, but I would have wanted to see at least two more to play around in. At least the game makes up for it that these two stages are randomly generated, which does force you to keep an eye out on your mini map to know where you're going, and the developer has already confirmed that more is on its way, so overtime, this wont be much of a con. However, I do want to talk about the game in it's current state.
Currently, once you have unlocked everything, there isn't really much point to your Silver coins. I'll be honest, reader, I am not sure what the solution to this would be. What I do know is that unless you're aiming for the leaderboards, there will come a point when you just play the game without anything to spend your hard-earned rewards on. Maybe, it could be used for upgrading your next run with temporary modifiers? Or maybe, for betting on other players' runs? I am just throwing a few ideas up in the air here, because I find it a bit of a shame that they can't really spend it on much else after you have everything. At the very least, there is a lot of things to unlock, and that will keep you busy for a pretty good while.
I did state that you have control over the RNG to a certain point. That being said, sometimes you just get a bad run, and there is nothing you can do about it. In my experience, it doesn't happen often at all, but when it does, it just breaks the fun of the game. I know, that is the nature of a rogue-lite, so to speak. However, similar games have found ways to allow the player to gain more permanent power-ups, which in turn makes the early part of the run far easier to succeed in. It is a bit complicated in MEGABONK's case. However, it could just be a balancing issue rather than a game design one, and again, it doesn't happen often at all. Actually, the game has a quick start button to instantly reset your run for just such cases.
MEGABONK is an addictively chaotic and surprisingly deep game that appeared out of nowhere. While I've pointed out some of its current flaws, for a game this affordable, it delivers a massive amount of content and pure fun. The game practically dares you to break it, a challenge I don't just accept, but one I revel in. I'm here for the chaos.Currently, once you have unlocked everything, there isn't really much point to your Silver coins. I'll be honest, reader, I am not sure what the solution to this would be. What I do know is that unless you're aiming for the leaderboards, there will come a point when you just play the game without anything to spend your hard-earned rewards on. Maybe, it could be used for upgrading your next run with temporary modifiers? Or maybe, for betting on other players' runs? I am just throwing a few ideas up in the air here, because I find it a bit of a shame that they can't really spend it on much else after you have everything. At the very least, there is a lot of things to unlock, and that will keep you busy for a pretty good while.
I did state that you have control over the RNG to a certain point. That being said, sometimes you just get a bad run, and there is nothing you can do about it. In my experience, it doesn't happen often at all, but when it does, it just breaks the fun of the game. I know, that is the nature of a rogue-lite, so to speak. However, similar games have found ways to allow the player to gain more permanent power-ups, which in turn makes the early part of the run far easier to succeed in. It is a bit complicated in MEGABONK's case. However, it could just be a balancing issue rather than a game design one, and again, it doesn't happen often at all. Actually, the game has a quick start button to instantly reset your run for just such cases.
Closing Thoughts:
VERDICT: Recommended
Reviewed on PC
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