BARREL ROLL
- Hubert Spala
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
BARREL ROLL describes itself as a roguelike deckbuilder, and I mean... Fair enough. It's their game, they can call it whatever they want! But in my eyes, the devs are cutting themselves short here. Sure, if you get all nitty-gritty about the mechanical flow of the game, you could use some broad strokes to describe it as such. Your bullets are the cards. Your barrels are your decks. Got it. But for me, this is just a very different and very fresh approach to the genre, and I want to appreciate it for what it is. So, let me glaze this game a bit, because for what it is, it is a lovely chunk of fun.
In the non-descript future, there are living robots. And, because of course, they are also space cowboys. With proper hats, leather pants and wild west hard coded into their circuits. You're a nameless bounty hunter, a killerbot with a mission to clean up the trash. Nine pesky villains pollute this peaceful rock, and it is your well-paid duty to see them taken out. A simple premise rendered well in dusty monochrome and hard printed silhouettes.
How are you going to distribute justice for cash? Simple. With your trusty six-shooter, a mighty revolver of choice. Each chamber can be loaded up with a variety of high-tech bullets, each with its own unique flavour of punishment. Some bullets set the goons on fire.
Others stun them, delaying their reactions. Yet others still have a variety of conditions to grow in power or bust through even the heftiest ionic shields. Your goal is to create a perfect set of death dealers in your spinning drum to deal with any group of badasses that think to cross your way. Here lies the core fun of the game - finding suitable combinations of bullets to reap benefits in order of their firing.
Because what makes this game stand out from other, more classical card games is that the position of your bullet matters. And by that, I mean its placement in the drum. You can't just pick and choose your next shot all willy-nilly. You can spin the barrell a little to pick one of the next 3 options, but each time you roll your drum you also plan for the next shot, as the whole thin shift like, well... a barrel in a revolver. Duh. This becomes even more of a thing once you start getting upgrades to your drum, empowering certain positions to get stronger, making proper bullet placement an even more important part of your game plan.
This simple shift in gameplay translates well to each encounter too, as your enemies will happily toss you a variety of debuffs to limit your options or poison your choices, making unsavoury shots hurt you right back. But worry not! You can purge your gun of nigh all nasty effects simply by reloading it. Or swapping to your second drum. Remember, swapping is always faster than reloading! However, this does come at a hefty cost - all enemies work on a countdown clock, performing actions once the number ticks down. Reloading your gun is a slow and tedious action, greatly hastening the goons in their capabilities to do you harm.
And so, it is a finely tuned dance of rapid decisions and proper planning. Each boss has its own gimmick; there is a proper roguelike run structure of deciding what upgrades you want to gun for. And there's another cool system to spice up the play. Your high noon abilities. Each allows you to spend precious focus to ramp up the damage against a single target, reach for a bullet that is currently too deep in the drum, or square off against the whole gang by fanning the hammer to blast them all in a single turn. Manage them well, and you can breeze through encounters.
Now, I have to say I had a lot of fun playing this little game. On my second run, everything just fell into place. I had rounds where I cleaned the screen without a single enemy ever having a turn to act. I cleared bosses without losing a single drop of my precious mechanical health. I got a proper understanding of how to combo certain bullets together and once got my killer shell that ramped up damage for each fatal shot. At the end of the run, it packed such a punch that I could just deck a thug from 100% to the coffin in a single shot. That felt good.
If there's one issue the game has, that at least for me isn't an issue at all... it is the scope. Nine bosses, sixty bullets, thirty trinkets. You will kinda sorta see all of them on your third, maybe fourth run. Sure, it doesn't mean you're going to have less fun, as the five threat levels are going to test your grasp on the core mechanics well enough. But it is, still, a smaller game that likely aims to hold you invested for a few hours, a couple of evenings, and then move on to greener pastures. Which, again, is completely fair.
The game is almost comedically cheap for the level of polish it displays and for the ingenuity behind its systems. If you're a fan of this kind of gaming structure, and are looking for something fresh, it's almost a crime to NOT get BARREL ROLL into your library. I definitely enjoyed my time with it, and I am sure as heck that you will too - if you like the "deck builders" in general, that is.
