I sluggishly engaged myself with the slaying, delaying my morning routine on the weekend in honor of Shroom & Doom's attitude. Although anyone would agree that between them this is the better game, is it strange to say that I miss it in some way here? Perhaps I feel with things of the "cyber" and/or "slayer" style, the narrative tone needs to supply enough to make way for the aesthetic gratuity. My first play was with an ignorance of my dash ability, which quickly becomes necessary past the sixth wave; the game would hold to satisfy past this point were it coded to handle this number of entities on screen, but despite the lag I was able to play, and I won't suspend any belief that it impaired my skill. At the same time, I couldn't be committed enough to play again to an ending, if there is one.
The game is a sound Nerve based gun-game with a well-paced event structure; the beater provides a quatrain of enemies that narrate the harmonic mazer portion of acquiring weapon modifiers and retaining my multiplier, and a delectably rewarding sitter in the falling action of character upgrades. The upgrades themselves, however, are really only a feeling, as it seems to just give out a random splash of points for each of the three stats. A nice side effect of the showmanship could have been the ability to play without picking up any upgrades, but they don't seem to disappear over time.
Minecraft has had an arbitrary leveling and experience mechanic for quite some time now, but upon further inspection it seems to be acting in a very particular way for the sense of immersion. Levels don't really do anything for the player on their own, as they normally would in other games; instead they are a representation of the bank of energy that I've extracted from other places. This energy directly translates into the magic system, which is a surprisingly coherent isolation of purpose that the typical "RPG" couldn't replicate.