A Way To Die somehow reminds me of Cavity Busters. Both are Bullet Hell Roguelikes that involve parts of the internal body and such. However, what differs the both of them is their accessibility. Cavity Busters has much more mechanics at play, whereas A Way To Die is less complicated in that nature making it easier to pick up and play.
Pick Your Disease
The type of disease you play depends on the difficulty you choose. Difficulty/Disease ranges from Cold (Easy), Influenza (Normal), Covid-19 (Normal) and Cancer (Hard). Each disease has their own goal where you have to target specific organs in order to win. At the start each disease also has their own handicap or bonus to them as well such as the amount of hearts(life) you start off with to the damage amount you deal amongst others.
Familiar Parts
Though being a roguelike, the total number of rooms you have is fixed, it’s only the room layout and what enemy spawns in them is randomized. What’s clever is that all the rooms will make out the outline of the whole body. The organs will have a fixed room and are basically the boss rooms for the game. Each organ has their own characteristics, attack pattern, moveset and all that jazz.
To Rush or Not to Rush?
As the boss fights are challenging, the neat thing this game does is there’s incentive to rush for the organs(boss fights) even though you are underpowered, it will leave the game with no room to add in a mutation, called Contamination in order to make it more difficult for the player. The longer you play, the more the contamination bar fills up and as it becomes full, a Contamination is added in order to scale up the difficulty. Such as adding Elites to rooms, enemy hitting harder, enemy shots can stun you etc.
To counter or balance the Contamination, with every enemy killed they drop a currency that allows you to upgrade yourself by Mutating your disease. Mutation ranges from Normal, Rare to Epic where each costs vary and will give you a randomised item depending on the type you purchase.
Final Thoughts
As mentioned at the start, A Way To Die feels very accessible to players who aren’t familiar with Bullet Hell and Roguelikes with its logical and clever layout of the game system. Furthermore the difficulty isn’t as punishing though it can be challenging if you rush for the Organs early on, as with Roguelikes in this nature, the more you “farm” the more powerful you get, making the boss fights easier. With the way the mechanics work, the controls being tight and responsive, visually it doesn’t get too messy or crazy, A Way To Die has all the makings of what one would call a solid game for the genre it finds itself in.
Purchase A Way To Die on Steam today!
Hailing from a small Island. Huge football fan. Drinks too much tea.
Survival, Roguelikes, Turn-based or Indie games in general are my go to genres but I like to dabble in all kinds of genres. I tend to have a soft spot for Shmups and Hidden Object Games once in a while.
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