Proves That Bullet Heaven Games Need Variety And Content To Stay Awesome
Pets Survivors raises the question of whether you can get away with making a budget bullet heaven game and not top it up with loads of enemies, levels and boosts to your character. The answer is no, a bullet heaven definitely needs all those things, but Pets Survivors has a likeable, fairly playable stab at whether it can get away with it.
Pets Survivors assumes that our pets will be the last ones wandering the apocalypse. You make your choice of dog, cat, cockatoo or other pet, arm yourself with your choice of weapon, and head into either the Woods or Snow to kill some monsters.
All Dogs Go To Bullet Heaven
Aside from selecting difficulty, your only other decision is whether to play with manual or automatic firing – basically, whether you want to make Pets Survivors a twin-stick shooter, or a Survivor-a-like. Considering that the reloads are painfully slow in the opening moments, we tended to opt for automatic, so that we could squint and imagine that we were playing Vampire Survivors.
Things start in a typical bullet heaven style. Slimes approach slowly, and you get to pling bullets at them with your pistol or revolver. They drop diamond-like gems of different colours, which fill up the XP bar across the top of the screen, until you earn yourself an upgrade. You get to pick from four, and they confer benefits like bouncing bullets, extra hearts and magnetised pickups. They’re not all boringly standard, though: I quite liked one that gave you extra streams of bullets but reduced your damage as a result, and another that gave you the chance of finding extra life pips amongst the dead, but doesn’t immediately give you any benefit.
Then it’s the old game of trying to out-level the enemies who are chasing you. They get increasingly strong, tossing yetis and waves of flies at you, while you’re picking up gems and upgrading your favourite boosts, over and over again. I’d tend to go for multi-shots and bouncing bullets early, maximising the number of hits I make, and only then improve my damage and any other effects of those bullets. It meant I was a bit naff in the opening moments, but every buff was multiplied from that point onwards.
Feed Me, Seymour
Pets Survivors does an odd thing at the one-third and two-third milestones, hemming you in with carnivorous plants. They surround you, creating a kind of boxing ring for you to fight in. On my first run, this was actually quite tense: there was nowhere to run, and I was stuck in an arena that was getting packed with enemies. But that was only for the first run. In subsequent runs, after buying improvements from the shop, I was able to carve through these plants to get their lucrative diamonds. They went from a trap to a kind of ‘bonus round’ pinata in the space of two runs.
The enemies come thick and fast but, in all honesty, they’re nothing to worry about. Stone golems and yetis are pretty much the only threats, and that’s because they are the only enemies to actually fire projectiles. But those projectiles can be shot, which happens accidentally 99% of the time, particularly if you are playing on Automatic. The enemies are slow, melee, and – as long as you’re keeping up with your XP diamonds – only take one or two shots to kill.
Each run takes 10 minutes as default (they can be shortened or prolonged), and a boss waits at the end. There are two levels in Pets Survivors, and the boss is a recolour in both. Again, he’s nae bother: he has two attacks, including a rush which you can dash to avoid, and a bouncing ball that tends to be random rather than targeted. Again, if you have been focusing on damage and survival abilities rather than magnetised pickups, say, then you will make short work of them.
Emptying The Shop On Every Run
Finishing a run, you will have gold in your coffers, and that means some spending money in the game’s shop, weapon store, and character stable. The shop basically hands you all of the game’s in-game upgrades and asks if you want them as default. We made the very easy choice of focusing on XP and gold multipliers at the start, and it proved to be the right choice. We would end up buying a third of the shop with every run, meaning that we had effectively purchased everything, across all three shops, in five runs. We were undoubtedly powerful, but it did mean there was less reason to play run after run. About the only thing left to unlock was the achievements for completing a run with each gun and character.
Pets Survivors’ problem is not the gameplay. Each gun is just about varied enough, and the characters each come with their own special move, activated with a tap of Y. You can toss knives in every direction, or send giant yarnballs bouncing around the screen. You have a neat dash button to momentarily avoid all attacks, and there’s a sense of power as you move through the upgrades.
Pets Survivors’ problems are pretty much twofold. The first is that it doesn’t have the ability to test the player. The enemies, bosses and weird venus-flytrap arenas are so toothless, while the damage boosts (and numerous ways of increasing your health) all make you invincible. I found that I completed runs without taking a single pip of damage.
Hoping That More Game Will Turn Up
The second is that there just isn’t enough packaged into Pets Survivors. There are two levels, and they are virtually identical outside of backdrops. The pool of upgrades is so small that I get to the dregs at the end of every run. And that damages build-variety: I end up with the same character every time, because some upgrades are essential (split bullets) and some are just painfully ordinary (any power that affects your special ability, which you barely need, and often aren’t aggressive anyway).
Pets Survivors is charming and surprisingly intuitive to play, but its greatest enemy isn’t on the battlefield. It’s a lack of budget. As it turns out, you can’t make a good bullet heaven game without lots of upgrades, levels and enemies. Every run ends up the same, and the difficulty never pokes its head above ‘trivial’. We enjoyed Pets Survivors for five runs or so, until we exhausted the shop and realised that no more levels were coming.
If anything, Pets Survivors made us appreciate the big hitters in the bullet genre even more. They’re rarely more than a tenner to buy, but they’re absolutely full of content and stuff to do. Pets Survivors shows you can’t cut those corners. Bullet heaven games need waves and waves of chaos to work, and Pets Survivors simply can’t afford them.
Important Links
Pets Survivors Lets Cats, Dogs And Chickens Battle Monster Hordes – https://www.thexboxhub.com/pets-survivors-lets-cats-dogs-and-chickens-battle-monster-hordes/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/pets-survivors/9MWFBDM2X79F/0010
