As a big fan of zombies, twin-stick shooters, and roguelike challenges, Bullets & Brains feels like a game pretty well made for me. It plays pretty well, continues to crank up the challenge as you go, and has just enough variety with unlockable heroes, new power-ups, and meta-progression stat bumps to stay interesting for a handful of hours. Unfortunately, once it gets into the endgame it sort of falls apart in terms of its overall lastability, but we’ll get to that.

Once again, you’ll find yourself stuck in the zombie apocalypse, and over the course of a number of missions, you’ll attempt to help carve out a safe zone for your camp of fellow survivors to live in. Starting out, the game takes it pretty easy on you, letting you get used to how things work. You’ll be able to fire your weapon, dash, kick off a special attack when you have enough stamina, and then periodically choose between a few upgrades roguelike-style as you accumulate experience from picking up brains. For roguelike shooter vets, none of this should be surprising, but even for newbies it should be pretty light and easy at first.

The deeper you go, hopefully having completed all mission objectives in each stage, you’ll unlock new characters who have different stats and primary weapons, unlock new perk options, and upgrade yourself as well to give you stat boosts in whatever key areas you’d like. Essentially beating every stage and level will likely just take a small handful of hours for genre vets, but beating the last few challenges will likely at least make you sweat a bit as things absolutely get hectic. I did find that the perk slots consumed with alternative weapons were generally wasted, as my character choice tended to be driven by the weapon they had, but with only 3 options I did find from run to run I had to adapt to whatever perks they were offering, upping the challenge, though maybe not in the way I’d have preferred.

What works for me is that this sits somewhere between arcade-style twin-stick shooters and pure roguelike shooters, and it just feels a little different in general. For the first half of my playthrough I’d say it tended to be pretty easy, but when things did begin to get crazy I did have to really begin considering the perks I was offered, sometimes needing to make tough choices. I do wish it either had a more varied survival mode, or perhaps a daily challenge, to entice me to keep coming back, but for the few hours it took to beat it, I’ll admit that I was having fun with it, and that’s not a bad thing.