Battle Shapers is a fast-paced arena shooter that tasks players with defeating endless waves of enemies to take down a series of robotic Overlords.
In Battle Shapers, players are put in the shoes of Ada, a cyborg tasked with reclaiming New Elysium from the Overlord robot masters that rebelled against the city. To do this, she needs to reclaim three massive towers, which are heavily guarded by robotic forces.
So, how does it function as a roguelike? Does it play smoothly? Can you punch people a lot? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our full review for Battle Shapers.
Battle Shapers
Developer: Metric Empire
Publisher: Metric Empire, Kepler Ghost
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: December 4, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $24.99
Battle Shapers‘ core gameplay is incredibly tight and fluid, letting players absolutely bulldoze their way through stages while they finesse their way around enemy encounters. There’s a primal satisfaction that comes with punching a robot into a million pieces with your giant fists, and the game completely nails its encounters.
The game’s stages feature a lot of hazards as well as optional challenges and branching paths, which sometimes involve a platforming section or a tough combat encounter. These additions help with making the game more challenging and rewarding, but there’s not a lot of variety to them.
It’s disappointing to say this, but Battle Shapers only really has a satisfying gameplay loop, as it fumbles its roguelike aspects due to a lack of commitment to the genre and the need to pad out the game due to its low amount of content.
Battle Shapers has three main bosses, which you need to kill in one single run in order to reach the final boss and beat the game. The player gets to choose the order they tackle the bosses in, and depending on the order the later ones become enraged, gaining more moves during their fights and adding modifiers to their stages.
The bosses scale up a lot as you progress through your run, so much so that at points it barely feels like you are doing damage to them. At a certain point in the game you are just grinding for health and damage upgrades to have the required stats to beat some of the fights, which feels tedious.
The last boss can even one-shot the player with some of its moves, needless to say it feels incredibly cheap and frustrating to get insta-killed one hour into a run. The fact that runs are basically the same every time, coupled with the lack of weapon variety, makes the game a repetitive experience.
Most items are unlocked through the meta progression currency, so early runs tend to blend together as the player won’t find more than two or three weapons to work with. Having to choose between upgrades you need, like health and shields or new weapons to try out is a tough choice, and stalls the game a lot.
Every weapon or ability found in Battle Shapers has a passive effect associated with them, which can then be absorbed to add to one of your current weapons. The game is somewhat restrictive with this, as not all effects work on all weapons, and they never really get to a stage where they feel meaningful.
One of the most egregious things is how weapons can’t feed into themselves, so you just feel weak throughout the entire game. If you have a gun that does fire damage, you can’t apply the modifier that does more damage to burning enemies. Why the game refuses to let you pick effects with beneficial synergies is beyond me.
Each boss is associated with a core, which the player can acquire and level up after fighting them a few times. These cores give you a main active skill, as well a different melee attack. Some trigger a berserk state that slows down time and lets you claw at enemies, while others turn your punch into a ranged skill.
These cores also open up a series of upgrades that can be acquired during a run, usually pertaining to the unique boss skill. The player can equip two cores at once; the primary one being responsible for your active skill and its upgrades, while the secondary one opens up a set of combat buffs that trigger under certain circumstances.
The cores end up becoming a very substantial part of your kit, and even the ones that seem weaker at first can get some great upgrades that might carry your run. Stealing a boss’ powers to use during your runs is always a fun mechanic, and they serve as one of the few systems in Battle Shapers where your upgrades are actually felt.
The player has access to a wide variety of weapons, like SMGs, rifles, pistols, and even a few weird ones like throwing axes. Not all of the game’s weapons are winners, in fact, you’ll probably be actively avoiding a couple of them, but there is definitely a lot of variety, as no two guns perform the same.
After beating the game the player also unlocks the corrupted weapons, which function in slightly different ways than their regular counterparts. This adds a little replayability to the game, and pairs nicely with the difficulty modifiers that are unlocked alongside this system.
The rewards for beating runs with a certain number of difficulty modifiers enabled are useful, giving the player more control over the gear that shows up in their runs, but they feel like too little too late since it’s difficult to imagine someone replaying Battle Shapers for fun.
Modern roguelike developers seem deathly afraid of their game not being replayable enough, to the point where they make beating a single run the point of the game. In its effort to force the player to go through multiple runs to have a chance at reaching the end, Battle Shapers sabotages itself and loses all natural replayability.
Battle Shapers is a fantastic game when you are fighting through waves of enemies, maneuvering around encounters while you punch everything that moves until it blows up, but then it immediately becomes abhorrent once you have to grind for upgrades because beating the bosses becomes a numbers game.
It’s difficult to recommend a game that feels so exhilarating to play but also tries to restrict you as much as possible so you don’t see all that it has to offer too fast. Most runs end in frustration rather than an urge to get better and try again, which means that Battle Shapers unfortunately fails as a roguelike.
