I dunno about this one. I like deckbuilding card battlers and I play a lot of weeb garbage – so this seemed right up my alley, but I can’t say it’s really done anything to impress me thus far.
It’s called Super Bullet Break and it’s basically what would happen if you took something like Slay the Spire and slapped some anime girls onto it. You get these maps to explore full of different rooms, encounters, items, and cards to find – all the usuals for the genre – but of course this time with an anime spin and really, that’s all there is to it. Nothing extra, nothing really unique, just the basics with an anime skin.
Okay, that doesn’t necessarily make it bad, but when you start picking apart those basics, problems do become apparent. For example, I don’t know if it’s just because I haven’t played for a dozen or so hours yet, but from what I have played, the runs feel a bit too reliant on RNG. Like, you get the same starting deck every time, so it becomes this gamble to HOPE that you get cards (which are called bullets in this game) to synergize with that starting deck in a given run. If you don’t – tough luck, you’ll get slapped down by the most basic mobs in just a few attacks.
If you do though, you start steamrolling. Well, for a bit. I’ve now played for several hours and still have not managed to clear every map in the first world. The balance is really all over the place and although I kept unlocking new cards, it felt like a lot of them were useless simply because they don’t synergize with what the game was providing me to start with. There’s a balance to be had between RNG elements and making a fun deckbuilder and Super Bullet Break is unfortunately leaning a bit too far to one side there.
And that’s before you consider the production values. This is obviously a low budget game, mobile game levels really. All the UI assets, the backgrounds, everything EXCEPT the character art is just not good. Of course, all that budget went into making really cool and detailed character designs to draw in an audience in the first place. It’s the kind of game that substitutes production values for near endless grind, given just how much you have to play to unlock more cards to work with.
The PC port isn’t the greatest either. There are no graphical options whatsoever – in-game at least, there might be some hidden config file outside of it, but I could not locate one myself. Fullscreen is not the default so you’ll need to alt+enter to force it to do so. Once there it at least looks decent, but is still locked to 60 fps. I will give the game some credit though – there is at least proper keyboard and mouse support, which is better than I can say for a lot of other weeb games.
That said, while Super Bullet Break is not terrible, I also have a hard time recommending it when so many other options exist within this same genre that not only play better, but have better production values. The mechanics are actually fine here and the possible synergies are cool, it’s just the balancing and production values that really bring it down. And that’s pretty much all I got – can’t say I’ll play enough to do a proper review, but wanted to at least talk about it a bit.
Quote: Super Bullet Break is not terrible, but simply does not have anything really going for it. The production values are low and the mechanics – while decent – are coupled with some not so good balancing.
Super Bullet Break retails for $20 USD on Steam, but you can support the channel by buying a copy through my Gamesplanet partner link. It is also available on PS4 and Switch.
I was provided a review copy of the game in order to write this review. Read more about how I do my game reviews here.
cublikefoot 