Summary
Viscerafest could easily appeal to boomer shooter fans who want a high-speed challenge that demands mastery of specific gameplay. However, the game’s obtuse design choices with gunplay, ammo management, enemy design, traversal, and level layout might leave most players feeling more alienated than the actual aliens Caroline crushes.
Developer — Acid Man Games, Fire Plant Games
Publisher — Fulqrum Publishing
Platforms — PC (Reviewed)
Boomer shooters, arena shooters, retro shooters, or whatever you want to call them, are loads of these FPS titles. Characterized by fast-paced spraying and praying, a varied arsenal of guns, and maze-like level design, one would be forgiven for thinking that each boomer shooter plays roughly the same.
However, subtle nuances in a boomer shooter can heavily alter the overall game feel. Viscerafest, for example, has all of the genre-specific traits, but it definitely has its own flavor that sets it apart. Unfortunately, that specific flavor might not appeal to all players.
Before you begin bunny hopping and blasting aliens, Viscerafest opens with a brief bit of background. You play as Caroline: a not-so-mentally-stable mercenary who wants to marry her boyfriend. Sadly, the perfect ring is a tad too pricey, so Caroline accepts a job to nab a high-paying bounty.
This is a goofy premise, which is good! As with most boomer shooters, all we need is a simple story explanation of why we’re shooting, and that’s it. The game’s story quickly and politely gets out of the way, but its hyper-wacky tone is never absent.
Caroline, for example, is a regular chatterbox during gameplay. She’s full of quips, wisecracks, and the occasional stint of singing. I found most of it enjoyable thanks to her actress’s strong performance, but it’s easy to see it getting on one’s nerves after hours of gameplay.
Hilariously, you can adjust how frequently Caroline interrupts gameplay with her commentary in the game’s settings. Options for one-liners range from ‘Never’ to ‘Bubsy’, a great choice for those who hate gaming in silence.
While I found the game’s story and dialogue inoffensively goofy, the rest of the experience didn’t sit well with me. Shooting each weapon felt nice, but managing ammo never did. You have an extremely limited amount of ammunition for each gun, and enemies often have specific weaknesses. Throw in the fact that most enemies have strangely large health pools, and each fight became a drawn-out slog to get through.
You can purchase a ‘cheat code’ upgrade to increase your ammo capacity, but I found enemy health to be a persistently irritating issue even as I upgraded my combat ability. As an experiment, I tried multiple levels on lower difficulties and found that the only real change was how much damage enemies dealt. Ammo management and enemy health remain frustratingly skewed on each difficulty.
It constantly felt like Viscerafest didn’t want me to play it like other boomer shooters. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it does mean that Viscerafest wasn’t my jam. It has an odd prioritization on melee combat, which definitely isn’t the game’s strong suit.
This title feels tuned to appeal to speedrunners or those looking for an extremely specific high-skill challenge. I imagine the game’s developers and some enthusiastic boomer shooter masochists love its breakneck speed and “Play it the right way or hit the highway” design.
Unfortunately, I found the frustrating design choices to continue piling up. Your default movement speed in Viscerafest is just barely too slow, and the only ways to move faster are a dash button and bunny hopping.
Holding down your jump button causes Caroline to cruise along at a much faster pace, and, to be fair, it is easy to control! The problem is that I don’t particularly enjoy seeing my screen persistently bounce up and down just because I want to move a bit quicker in a game.
The art for Viscerafest is lovingly pixelated but largely bland and repetitive. At high speeds of constant bouncing, the blur of pixels made me motion sick during each play session. The game’s uninspired and obnoxious music didn’t make navigating each confusingly laid-out level much better, either.
Viscerafest could easily appeal to boomer shooter fans who want a high-speed challenge that demands mastery of specific gameplay. However, the game’s obtuse design choices with gunplay, ammo management, enemy design, traversal, and level layout might leave most players feeling more alienated than the actual aliens Caroline crushes.
