If I were to describe Megabonk in any way, I would have to say it’s a mix of Vampire Survivors and Risk of Rain 2 combined, in terms of gameplay. The casual gameplay of a bunch of enemies coming to you, killing them to get gems for upgrades, with the random item gameplay that both games provide.

I really like the idea and concept of Megabonk, combining the two genres. I get this feeling of oddity from it, because while I am playing it, I am having fun with it (on the right character and build); however, the RNG can just screw you over.

Now the gameplay in Megabonk is very simple: you take out waves of enemies, defeat tougher enemies, and eventually bosses. The thing with Megabonk, though, is that you can’t upgrade stuff, like your stats. You also need to make sure that you do enough damage to take out enemies or get movement speed. Enemies will swarm you, and as you progress throughout the levels, you will come across more tanky enemies.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3645253106
You do have access to a few characters, with a few others that you can unlock in the game with the silver that you collect. You can find gold, and you use gold to help unlock treasure chests where you can get a random item. These items you collect help make your character more powerful. You will get duplicates of your items, but they do stack, and there are ways to turn your duplicates into other items.

When in a level, your sole objective is to find the boss portal, where you will have ten minutes until these enemies spawn. These ghost enemies are super fast, do a lot of damage, but when taken out, you can get some bonus silver. If you do beat the boss, which is usually a giant tanky enemy, you can go through a portal to a new area to redo the process. The levels are randomly generated, but you will start to know you are nearing a boss portal by seeing this red wind around you.

While you move around the level, you will come across a few things you can interact with. You can find pots that contain money or experience. Treasure chests are also in the levels, and you will need gold to open them. The cost to open chests does increase the more you open them. There are also shrines that you can find; standing near them for a few seconds will give you a perk that you can use.

Now, something I should point out about the items and shrines is that there are a few different tiers to the upgrades. There are common, uncommon, rare, and legendary grade perks and items. Most of the items in the game require you to complete quests to get access to them, and to spend silver on them to unlock them. For the shrine perks, most of them are common, with only three of the perks being of a different rarity.

Besides those, you can also find weapons and tomes. Each character has a certain weapon, but to get others, you will need to level up. Tomes are passive upgrades that you can get, which can help deal more damage or provide other helpful benefits. With all of this in mind, I can now finally talk about one of the major issues I have with Megabonk.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3645251495
Some of the tomes that you can get aren’t really helpful, with some of them I just outright avoided. Knockback, silver, gold gain, attraction, max HP, and HP regen are all useless. Silver and gold gain tomes are the best worst tomes out of the bunch. Throughout the levels, you will be getting a ton of gold, and there is already a power-up that increases the amount you get by just killing enemies. Silver gain is helpful sometimes, until you get a bunch of silver you can’t spend. Health or regen upgrades in this game do not matter in the slightest, since enemies do so much damage just by touching you, and I am talking about 50 damage per hit or more. Each character has different stats that make them different, but you can’t upgrade them as mentioned before.

There are also other useless upgrades, like knockback, attraction, etc, that aren’t really worth using. This issue is very noticeable when you first start the game, as you only have access to two weapon and tome slots. Not to mention that one of the slots is taken by the main weapon that the character you selected comes with. You can unlock more weapon and tome slots; the max is four for both.

Upgrading damage and movement speed is a must if you want to survive the levels; movement speed, you can somewhat get away with if you get some passive upgrades or a tome. Damage will always be the one stat that you need to put a ton of upgrades in. Especially when you get into the later tiers, the enemies, especially the bosses, have so much HP. That a level seven damage tome, which is meant to upgrade your damage stats for all weapons you can use and such, doesn’t help you at all.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3645250309
Essentially, Megabonk hands you a bunch of power-ups and weapons, and I feel like all of them do nothing. Even the ones I tried to make use of, or the ones that I actually liked, just get outclassed by the amount of damage that I have to do. I also feel that the game wants me to pay attention to certain things and not pay attention. I have no idea if this makes sense, but this is generally the feeling that I get while playing Megabonk.

Megabonk is at a very odd place for me; on one hand, the game is fun when you aren’t being destroyed by the game’s RNG. I feel as though this game is still in early access in some areas and that some more updates will go into it. Once the game has been ironed out and some of the issues are taken care of, I feel as if Megabonk will be a fine game.

If you want to play a game that requires some thought process, but you can also just turn your brain off, and it’s not Vampire Survivors. Then I actually recommend Bloons Tower Defense 6, that game requires you to somewhat think because you have to have certain upgrade trees to get certain combos or Paragons out. However, for 15.49 CAD or two bucks if it’s on sale, it’s worth the price with the hours of content that you can spend on the game

Looking for more reviews like this one? Then follow Skyknighter's Sleepless Nights

Plants vs Zombies is a game that I have been playing since my childhood, and when I found out that EA and PopCap were doing a remake, I was surprised. I’m going to be honest here, I am very torn on this game. There are things that I like, but also some things that just disappoint me. I have been playing PvZ ever since I was little, on my Nintendo DS. This game is pretty much my childhood, but I was very skeptical.

So, at a base level, PvZR is a fine game, it’s fun, and it has that PvZ charm that makes it fun. Also, some of the plants don’t cost real-world money, so when you purchase the game, everything is there, well, mostly. Now, one of the main controversies for this game was the price, mind you, 29.99 CAD is not a whole lot of money, but PvZ has historically been priced around five to ten dollars. The DS version was around a similar price to the remaster. Now, I had the physical version of the game, so I have no idea if there is anything else I am missing when it comes to the pricing history. I found the game in my local Walmart.

Now I have played the GOTY edition, and that game is actually still on Steam, priced at 4.99 CAD. While I have played that version of the game, I haven’t actually made an in-depth review of that game.

PvZ is a tower defense game where you defend your lawn from zombies, with each plant costing a certain amount of sun. Each plant you get has a specific use and cost to them; they also have a recharge time, so you can’t spam them. You mainly get five rows, but you do have six once you get into the pool levels. Each row has tiles where you can put plants down, and sometimes you may need a lily pad for pool levels and flower pots for the roof levels.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3609298428
When you boil it down to it, PvZ is a very easy and simple game to understand, and it’s nothing too hard, so this game is pretty casual on a surface level. There are minigames you can play; they are back, however, a few from the DS version never made it in. Which is one of the few cuts that the game had. Zombatar is also not in this version, which lets you make your very own custom zombie, and it would show up on each wave of zombies as the flag zombie.

Now, to say there is nothing new to the game would be a complete misrepresentation, as the game has introduced a few new features. You, of course, have the typical features like adventure mode and the Zen Garden that the game offers. However, it also has a new hard mode called Rest In Peace Mode (RIPM). RIPM is a new game plus, but all the lawn mowers are removed except for one, and you only have one chance to beat the game. If you die, you have to redo the entire game, and if you are looking for a more challenging PvZ without playing adventure mode, this is a fine edition, I suppose.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3609305181
I do like that some plants that I never really considered using are useful, but that’s because this game actually just likes to spam the most problematic zombies in the game. As I have been playing this game for years, I have not seen this many Catapult, Balloon, or even Gargantua zombies. And taking out some of these requires you to use certain plants, which is fine for something like Catilpluts, but dealing with four or five Gargantuas, it’s a little tough to handle. Especially when you have to keep in mind that it takes like two explosives, or Squashes, to just kill one of them.

There are also rainy days; these are twelve daytime levels where there is the occasional rain, where the sun flowers fall asleep, and the sun doesn’t fall. Vasebreaker, I Zombie, and Survival Endless are still here; however, they completely destroyed survival mode. While the levels for all five worlds are there for normal and hard, Endless has been killed. Instead of there being survival endless for each stage, there is only endless for pool daytime, that’s it. They gave us one map to farm money, but no endless day/night for the front, fog, and roof levels.

There are also 12 different cut minigames that the devs gave to us to play; they are still a fun inclusion. There is multiplayer, so that mode from the 360/PS3 versions is there. I never played those versions of the game, but the entire game feels and looks like it’s from those versions.

PopCap and EA have decided to use AI upscaling, and while I don’t mind this fully, the original artists were never created or even asked to work on the game. The art, up close for the plants, is blurry and of low quality. When up close, the split pea has one of its eyes closed on the repeater.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3609296700
The game as a whole works fine. I did get one crash and a black screen, but that was really it. There is a bug in Fog survival, where the fog will cover up the screen when you are preparing your plants for that wave. In other words, you need to use Blover to pretty much take care of the fog. Newspaper zombies also have a visual bug where their jaw disappears when dropping their newspaper, if they die during the animation.

I am aware that the game got a patch recently, so these issues could be fixed. I am just not playing the game anymore at the time of writing this review.

PvZR is an ok remaster. There are worse ones out there, like the Warhammer 40K Space Marine 1 remaster, but I won’t deny that this remaster is lazy. I can only really recommend this game to die-hard fans of PvZ or for people like me, who were nostalgic for the original game. However, if you are new to the series, I still don’t recommend this game, as the original is still on Steam for 4.99 CAD and has more content than this version.

In other words, there really isn’t a reason to pick this game up over the original, making this a complete waste of money.

Looking for more reviews like this one? Then follow Skyknighter's Sleepless Nights