Kill, Die, Repeat – Boss Crushers Game Review

Every boss deserves to be crushed by a hero.

Boss Crushers  is a rogue-lite game in which we run our own mercenary guild. Our heroes travel through portals to different lands to kill the bosses striving for order and dozens of their minions. The creators assure that they focus on a high level of difficulty, even claiming that “you have virtually no chance of winning during the first attempts to beat the game”. But what is the practice like?

Death is just a new beginning

The work of the Space Horse studio takes us to a land plagued by powerful creatures… and that’s all you need to know. The production does not even try to build a deeper plot or explain what is happening in the created world. This is not a particularly disadvantage, as the structure of the game does not require an overly refined shell anyway. We start the game in a small chamber by choosing a hero, and then we decide on one of the three portals, where enemies will be waiting for us. Each land we move to is a randomly generated maze of rooms in which we have to fight dozens of monsters and machines. In some of the rooms, after you have cleared them of unwanted stuff, you can meet merchants or chests filled with random treasures. However, you have to be careful, because in one of the rooms there is a powerful boss, and crossing the thresholds of his estate is irreversible. Fortunately, the door to it is clearly distinguishable from the rest, so we can leave it for the end.

Clearing all locations before starting the main fight is profitable not only because of the possibility of acquiring interesting items that facilitate the gameplay. During the fight, our heroes gain experience, and each new level is an increase in statistics and the choice of skills that passively affect our firepower. The fun continues until we clear all three locations or are killed trying to do so, and then start all over again. However, this does not mean that our efforts are wasted, because regardless of the result, at the end we get experience for our guild, which we can use to discover skills that affect our entire game or unlock new heroes.

You never know what’s in the chest

Visually, the game does not stick to the chair, but looks rather solid. Simple, slightly cartoonish graphics correspond with a light style of fun, offering us quite atmospheric locations with their own unique style. The animations of our heroes and their opponents also fully reflect their character. The audio setting does not differ from what we see on the monitors, increasing the tension during exploration and giving a clear dynamics during the battle sequences. The bits and pieces that trigger during the boss fights add to the verve, clearly indicating that the jokes are over.

Noteworthy is quite a variety of items that can be obtained from chests found during the exploration. Strengthening and healing potions, items that increase stats while worn, or triggering specific events. The multitude of equipment that can be completed can make you dizzy. However, you should be careful with using them, because we discover the way the scrolls work only after activating them, and using the summoning will not always bring you friendly creatures. We also have a large arsenal in the case of skills, because each hero has their own set of them, and these can also be changed with the help of new abilities acquired during the game.

This is always not enough for this

Although Boss Crushers  is a quite polished production, it is not a perfect game. Its biggest problem is already in the title, because how can you talk about boss crushers, since there are only a few of them. Although the higher the difficulty level, the more our final opponents have a wider range of special attacks and become less predictable, it doesn’t take much time to learn tactics on a few big enemies. It is similar with lesser servants, who also do not sin in diversity. Given that the game is all about repeating three stages over and over again, the low differentiation of opponents makes boredom creep in quite quickly. It would be swallowing if we were dealing with an Early Access production, but Boss Crushers already has the premiere behind him. Bad, Space Horse, oh bad.

Of course, we cannot forget that we are talking about a multiplayer game and things are going quite well here. Decimating enemies together with friends can be a lot of fun, and the possibility of picking up a companion after a fall makes it possible for us to make small mistakes. Here, however, there was also a spoonful of tar, because the degree of difficulty does not scale in any way and a greater number of players automatically means a smaller challenge. This way, the creator’s intro assurances are completely irrelevant when assembling a team.

There is no doubt that Boss Crushers  is a game with potential, and Space Horse has tried to make it polished in every detail, but the poor variety of opponents and a small number of bosses make it all get lost by rapidly creeping boredom. It’s a pity, it could have been really good.

We would like to thank the Space Horse studio for making the review copy available for PC.