Nightmare Reaper Review

Nightmare Reaper is as rawly aggressive as the thrash motifs driving it. It’s a game that revels in retro visuals and blazing speeds — with so much happening on the screen simultaneously, your head will spin. Directly inspired by the shooters of the 90s, it takes the best parts of those games and does something new with the formula.

In a novel move, it procedurally generates levels, meaning things change every time you die or restart. The aesthetic changes in each chapter, shifting from watery and spiky pits to hospital wards and cities, and if you can find them, space stations where pets can be purchased that help you uncover secrets. These layouts are unique with each new playthrough, but hitting switches, discovering keys, or locating suspicious walls to kick through is a constant. At its best, the procedural element generates deliberate levels, which is impressive considering its layering. That said, it’s not perfect, with sections occasionally recycling, dead ends cropping up, and times when you feel like you're ramming your head against a wall level after level before you finally get to a stage that allows you to progress.

Nightmare Reaper is stuffed to the brim with content, though. There are upgrades, buffs, rebuffs, and all that jazz. With secrets and power-ups cropping up everywhere, droves of different enemy types, and 80+ weapons to seize — all with modifier possibilities — you can ice up the undead or blast them right in the face with a laser fired from a book, of all things. You can choose one weapon to carry to the following stage, and the looting-progression element encourages you to reap gold and find hidden rooms littered with treasure. By finding in-game cartridges, you’ll get new skill trees on a Gameboy Advance SP sub-screen, which can be accessed anytime for a mountain of purchasing upgrades. When acquiring a new skill, you get to play a rudimentary 2D stage that mimics the likes of Gradius or Super Mario Bros. 3. Talk about nailing nostalgia!

The gunplay is waist-deep in bones and guts, coupling dry humour with ultra-violence and painting the screen pixelated demon guts. It doesn’t achieve the same feedback as something like DUSK, but it spews mindless, spectacular hordes to carve into pieces with your weapons. The music is excellent, with DOOM Eternal’s Andrew Hulshut summoning a predictable but perfectly applied set of metal tracks with thundering riffs and head-bang riffs. The controls worked very well, and I never felt they were working against me.

However, there are a few caveats. In addition to the procedural element occasionally coming up short, there are some balancing changes needed — at around 90 levels, it can become exhausting under the weight of it all. Its pixelated rendering can be confusing, especially when searching for switches or keys, as many of the secret rooms or items often aren’t usual or worth your time. As for the story, you play as a bloodied female patient in a psych ward who is slipping in and out of nightmare dreamscapes. It's pretty interesting, but having to return to the hospital between each stage for minor changes or a new page of the journal quickly wears thin.

Nightmare Reaper does, however, achieve most of what it sets out to do, pushing boundaries regarding weaponry, spectacular abilities, and more trinkets than Barry Manilow’s rumpus room. It’s at its best when it devolves into a mesmerising guts fest at the whims of your creative weapon and ability choices. So while imperfections exist, its violent, adrenaline-fueled highs will make it appealing to fans of old-school FPS games.