Party Like it’s Past the End of the World
Cooperative play is the French fries of the gaming world. A single-player campaign or other multiplayer component serves as the main feature—the hamburger, if you will—while co-op is seen as complimentary. Sometimes French fries and co-op are simply filler, meant to pad the main attraction, as you will find with many fast food joints or Mario + Rabbids. Other times, they can fail to even be filler, like with Binding of Isaac. Then you have poutine fries, a calorie juggernaut that laughs at main dishes. The gaming equivalent of those gravy-laden sticks of love are Overcooked! and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
Neurovoider created a solid hamburger completely overshadowed by its French fries. Not many rogue-lites nail cooperative play. Oftentimes, adding a second player acts as a hindrance rather than help. In Neurovoider, co-op retains the complexity, firefights, and challenge found in single-player while emphasizing the strategic components of team play. Once you and your partners nail down the intricacies of the game, you’ll function like a well-greased diner.
What is it?
Neurovoider touts itself as a twin-stick shooter RPG with rogue-lite elements, which is true as long as RPG stands for “Rogue-Plite Game.” You have 20 levels to overcome (sprinkled with four boss battles), and permadeath robs you of all progress. The difficulty level may not reach the heights of Enter the Gungeon or Crypt of the Necrodancer, but you’ll experience a fair share of premature deaths before reaching the game’s climax. As you blast through masses of robots, you collect a scrap heap of better weapons and parts to soup up your mechanized warrior.
Each play-through prompts you to select one of three brain-powered robots: a petite model with dash capabilities, a medium build able to unleash its weapons at increased fire rates, or a large machine capable of invincibility at the price of mobility and firing ability. Each robot sports two guns which deplete your EP when fired. Your EP gradually refills over time, but if you completely exhaust your energy, you’ll be unable to fire until you bot cools down. As such, your fights will play out as a series of attacks and retreats as you manage your reserves.
You complete a level when you destroy all reactors on the map. After this, you are transported to a menu screen where you can upgrade your character. Based on the items you grabbed from dead enemies, you can switch your head, body, legs, and guns for better parts and then sell any weaker items for scrap. This currency can then buy health, random better gear, or upgrades to your current load-out. In multiplayer, you can share items with each other, which proves vital as each of you will pick up parts that may not work for your model but will fit your partner’s.
Once you’ve finished this, you’re booted to a level select with three options, each with different stats in regards to size, elites, and loot. Big maps offer more chances to kill enemies for upgrades. The large elite robots can take and deal more damage but pack a ton of loot, so stages bursting with them can obliterate you or make you beefy. Loot corresponds to the likelihood of receiving better items, and only a full loot stat yields the possibility of the highly-lethal glitched weapons. At times, you’ll encounter special stages based around a certain theme (i.e. time limits, all elites, darkness) which grant a level-skip token upon completion.
In single-player, if you die, an evil copy of that robot will appear in your next run. Like in my everyday life, the past comes back to haunt you.
What’s good?
- Behind the simple twin-stick shooter gameplay lies a significant amount of customization and strategy. In addition to your robot model, you can choose one of 27 chips (abilities like healing, increased damage, and extra lives) to alter your run. The stages you select can also determine your later success, and sometimes the best choice is to reroll the stages or skip a level entirely. You may find a glitched weapon capable of wiping out the entire screen, but your build may not have the EP necessary to sustain such firepower. Your success often relies on your understanding of the game’s mechanics as opposed to pure skill alone.
- To the surprise of no one who read my introduction, the couch co-op enhances the overall game. Three is the magic number, allowing each player to select a different build. This approach encourages each player to take a specific role, be it the long-range explosive expert, the kamikaze physical fighter, or an EP tank capable of sustaining fire. With these builds, no items go to waste, and the team can keep trucking even if one player suddenly dies. Combined with the drama and passive aggression of kinship, multiplayer helps to reduce the sting of bad RNG or abrupt difficulty spikes.
- Neurovoider features an impressive art style and soundtrack. Considering I’ve written some 10 reviews praising this aspect of a game, I’ve lost all ability to explain exactly what makes good visuals and music. Suffice to say Neurovoider utilizes only the most exquisite pixels and foot-stompingly good bleeps and bloops.
What’s bad?
- The pacing can make for exhaustingly long runs. The average run clocks around an hour for an experienced solo player and significantly longer for newbies and couch co-op. At least a quarter of your time is spent on customization screens, and individual levels can drag out with poor builds. Combat also favors players who retreat while firing, and rushing forward almost always ends in death. As if to spite our free time, multiplayer doesn’t even have a save feature, so if you want the pleasure of teamwork, you better devote an afternoon to the orgy or never play another game again.
- Like in a bleach-drinking contest, death can be unfair, sudden, and unexpected. You could sport the fanciest of parts and weapons, but a single boss or group of elites can utterly ravage you in seconds, flinging you to the first level. Death and rogue-lites go hand-in-hand like co-dependent sociopaths, but when bad luck murders you instead of lack of skill, my salt cup runneth over.
- Without any unlockable content, the game’s longevity is determined by how quickly you can beat the final boss and how much you enjoy it to play again. After about ten hours, I experienced just about as much variety the game had to offer. This may satiate some, but compared to the content offered by Isaac or Dead Cells, Neurovoider feels sparse.
What’s the verdict?
Although I have touched upon some rough spots, Neurovoider serves up a solid and fun experience, be it the French fries or hamburger. I don’t often find people willing to be in a threesome with me, but when I do, I try to sneak in at least half a game of Neurovoider. The Switch has several co-op and rogue-lite games worth your money and time, and this one certainly justifies your attention if you’ve already rocked through the likes of Isaac, Overcooked 2, Enter the Gungeon, and Snipperclips. No matter how tiring a singular run can be, I never found myself close to being bored.
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 8
- Time Played: Over 10 hours
- Number of Players: 1-4
- Games Like It on Switch: Enter the Gungeon, Tallowmere