GOI Survivors

Review

After fighting numerous battles at his side, a goddess falls in love with a brave soldier and decides to grant him immortality by giving him a relic, a sword. Unfortunately, an evil god discovers the sword's power and corrupts it with a spell. After witnessing her beloved soldier's demise, the only way to end the conflict is to cast a magic spell on the sword, but she would need a bit of time to prepare the spell, which is where you came into the picture. You must go into dungeons to fight and eliminate as many evil monsters as possible until she can cast her spell. She will only need twenty minutes. Now GOI Survivors!

GOI Survivors is an action bullet hell game developed and self-published by Urihimura on the Steam platform on the 26th of December, 2023.

The game consists of five levels of difficulty. At first, you'll only have access to the Easy and Normal difficulties.  It will take some time to beat the Normal level and unlock the Hard, Extreme and Breathtaking Onslaught Challenge Arena levels. Apart from the last one (B.O.C.A), in which you have to try to survive as long as you can, you beat the difficulties by reaching the 20-minute mark.

I like the fact that each race - the humans, elves, dark elves, dwarves and orcs - has three different classes, each with their own specific weapons and spells. This makes a good combination of party choices.

You'll start the game with one character. The time will be displayed at the top of the screen and will begin from 0. On the bottom right corner of your screen, you have a map that will only display colour dots for medic packs and chests when you are close to them. Apart from that, the map will be black. At the bottom of the screen, there will be two gauges: health and experience points. For example, if you choose a human as your first character, you can't select his class until you pick up your first shard. Each time you kill an enemy, it will drop a coloured coin, and each time you collect a coloured coin, it will increase your experience point gauge.  When the gauge is full, three options will appear on your screen, and you’ll select one of them. These options are primarily skills attributed to the character classes, which you can upgrade repeatedly. After you choose one of these options, the experience gauge will deplete completely, and then you'll have to refill it to access another three upgrades and so forth. So, from zero to one minute, you'll have one character. As soon as you reach the minute, a green arrow will appear next to your character and point to a direction where you can add a new character to your party, and the same thing will happen when you reach five minutes to add your third and final character.

In battles, the onslaught of incoming enemies will steadily increase as the minutes go by. At first, it will be enemies with a melee weapon, then enemies with ranged weapons, followed by cavalry units. But you'll also be fighting larger units with several different attacks; some have spells, while others shoot several projectiles at once. These larger units, when killed, will drop a chest, which will display another screen with six options to improve your party skills.

Whether or not you reach the 20 minutes, you'll receive some coins which you’ll need to upgrade your skill trees. There are 12 skills, and each can be upgraded up to seven times. And of course, all the upgrades will increase in cost. You can also purchase a faerie, Faeriela; she has five different types of upgrades, but prepare to lose a big chunk of your coins to acquire her services, and her upgrades are rather costly.

I have played a few games of this genre, and I enjoy them. If you have a quick 20 minutes to spare, then you can play a quick game. But for me, the party combination factor is fun. So far, I have managed to beat the Hard difficulty several times to accumulate more coins. I fell short of winning the Extreme difficulty many times and stayed alive for up to four minutes in the B.O.C.A dungeon. 

GOI Survivors is a fun little title, and it is well-priced, but after a while it does become repetitive. I also feel that the dungeons could have more obstacles or levels, with several rooms instead of one big square with not much in it. Each dungeon theme is different, which adds some variety.

The graphics are good, and the game runs well with partial controller support. GOI Survivors has been translated into 13 languages. 

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

GOI Survivors Steam Store Page