Viscera Review

Viscera is an arcade-style twin-stick shooter developed by Animation Logic Ltd. Claiming to be the culmination of 17 years of industry experience, this gritty shooter ditches such things as crafting and cutscenes and gets you straight into the action, knee-deep in alien guts. So, with that being said, what do you get when you dive into this insane, gore-filled massacre?

Well, let’s start off with the main gameplay which is: shoot until you die, racking up the most money to get first place on the leaderboard. Oh, don’t think for a second you can spend that money on anything. It’s just your score. Enemies will get tougher and more numerous as the seconds tick by, but you’ll be getting stronger as well. As you kill enemies, you gain EXP and level up, which will allow you to choose an upgrade. They can range from improving your weapons and character to more risky ones, such as putting your HP at 1% in exchange for three upgrades at once and a 50/50 chance you’ll either double your money or die. You can’t reroll your choice of upgrades, so you better adapt your strategy as you play.

But that’s not all that will help you survive. There are also a variety of power-ups to temporarily turn you into a better death machine. Slow down time, gain invincibility, empower your bullets with red or blue plasma (I can’t tell the difference), or set off a mini-nuke. They will allow you to kill faster and last just that little bit longer to that next level up. They’re fun, but become necessary in the later waves.

At the time of review, there were only four levels (one available at the start, the rest are unlocked by obtaining a certain medal in the previous stage) with each bringing their own challenges and enemies like flamethrower turrets and electrical hazards, but they will all look the same eventually. The battlefield will absolutely be covered in blood, guts, explosive residue, and all sorts of crap before you even hit the one-minute mark. It’s kind of awesome seeing a once relatively clean area turn into a sea of viscera. That being said, wow they can really kick your ass sometimes. I disliked the Power Station level the most as not only is it lacking in space with tight areas, it constantly spawns exploding enemies that will rinse your health in one shot. And guess what? You need a gold medal to unlock the final stage. At the time of writing, I’m in first place on that level’s leaderboard and I can only last four minutes. They start you off with an auto-shotgun for a reason.

While there are 50 weapons to use, ranging from standard rifles to minigun rocket launchers, it’s rare that you’ll actually use most of them. Aside from the fact that some of them are locked behind achievements, it’s based on luck if an enemy drops one that’s a higher tier than the basic white rarity weapons. You’ll probably be using those for the vast majority of a run, and have probably already taken the upgrade that empowers your current weapons at the cost of no more weapon drops.

It’s tough, and probably deliberately so, but some aspects just make playing the game that little bit worse. For example, I found myself losing my character at times because they were grey amongst mainly grey levels, and while they do have a white circle representing their health, it can go underneath enemies and anything overhead so when you’re surrounded, all you can rely on are the bullets/rockets/lasers coming out of your gun. Actually, if you look closely enough, you’ll notice your character is a default model. It’s not the overly manly soldier in power armour wielding a big-ass gun displayed proudly on the game’s Steam page, it’s a basic player model used as a placeholder. It’s not even holding a gun. Like, I know I’m playing a pre-release version and you won’t notice it in normal gameplay but you couldn’t make a custom model? It also lacks some feedback when it comes to destroying objects like enemy spawners and turrets. Since they don’t flash or spew damage numbers, for a good while I didn’t know you could destroy them.

It’s not all gameplay issues either. I didn’t like the UI in the main menu, you can't really tell what's selected unless you look closely and selecting your upgrades isn’t that much better. It’s a faint highlight that you can barely see. Also, Settings only consists of Audio, which isn’t great considering how much the framerate drops as the waves go on. In some levels, it can go from 60 FPS to 15 in two minutes. And as the FPS drops, movement gets worse as it becomes more floaty. Finally, some text is untranslated, so you’ll occasionally see some Russian.

Despite spending a lot of paragraphs noting all the issues, that shouldn’t really deter you from playing Viscera because, at the end of the day, it’s still a really fun time. Sure, it’s not the most complex game out there and you can probably experience all of its content in only eight hours at most, but damn if it isn't a great time all the while. Shooting is nice, killing enemies is even nicer, it feels good to be a death machine, and when you die it’s only a couple of seconds before you can try again. It definitely needs some refinement to its design, but if you’re looking for something fun, dumb, and awesome, you should check out Viscera.