With another June comes another Steam Next Fest featuring hundreds of thousands of demos from up-and-coming titles. As is the case with every Next Fest, most of the demos of the games we check out are the games we end up covering. While on a bit of the short side, Battle Shapers shows a lot of promise in a genre that is often unforgiving. I'm not talking about "roguelites," although Battle Shapers is one, but the arena shooter genre instead.
Last year I looked at Deadlink, a game that combined "Arena Shooters" and "Roguelikes," with each map being randomly generated and enemies getting progressively more difficult. Arena shooters consist of tightly packed areas featuring waves of enemies, usually with the odds stacked against the player in terms of numbers. Fortunately, power-ups and abilities are given to the player to even the playing field. Boomer shooters and arena shooters are used interchangeably but I feel "arena shooter" is a better term due to the "roguelike" nature of the game.
While Battle Shapers follows a general plot, the game features randomly generated maps yet feature a boss at the end of a specific path. In the demo build, only one path was available but the level can be repeated should the player wish to try out more combinations and loadouts. The protagonist can select up to two augments that will grant the player abilities for their run. The abilities I had for this demo build were a reflect ability and a dash punch that executed enemies upon reaching critical health. Gameplay-wise, Battle Shapers is similar to "hero" shooters like Overwatch and Valorant due to the abilities that players can earn throughout each run.
Similarly to Overwatch, there is an unlimited number of ammo to use, meaning that there was a lot of leniency when it came to surviving. Using the controller, there was a generous amount of aim assist that made it easier to track enemies without making it feel like I was magnetized to them. There were some enemies that were trickier to defeat, as some enemies in Dead Cells were when powered up by a generator. None of the enemies were incredibly hard to defeat, in fact, it seemed fair with traps setting off for enemies as they would for the player.
The demo concluded with the boss of the biome and with the current shock rifle build I had, it was almost too simple. This is where it's difficult for me to give advice as my suggestion for "increasing the difficulty" may be "too difficult" for others. I feel like the magazine size for each weapon is fine, but maybe make it so that it takes a while to reload a weapon. Giving the player a cooldown on weapon reloads may sound mundane but it will balance out the "infinite ammo" situation. The treasure crates contain in-game currency for players to purchase items during runs, so as of right now that is also perfectly fine.
As this is a fairly early playable demo build, things like the menu interface glitching I can excuse, although at one point the game was soft-locked for me on the screen when I was trying to select an ability I earned during a run. I couldn't move my controller and trying to unplug the controller to use the keyboard gave me an error instead saying that the controller must be plugged in. While I had to reboot the game and start over, it didn't happen again so long as I did not do something silly like press alt+tab to change windows.
Players can experience the Battle Shapers demo during this week's Steam Next Fest here! Thank you to the devs for allowing us to play an early-access version of the demo before it was made available to the public. Stay tuned for more Steam Next Fest coverage for the rest of the week!