Iron Crypticle

delicious arcade action

There are two of these games:
Iron Fisticle
Iron Crypticle

This one is the second of the two.
This is pretty much the as same as Fisitcle but with a better presentation and some optional bloom effects.
Layout feels more like a roguelike but it's pretty much just an arcade twin-sticker - which is perfectly fine as it is, a nice pick up and play shooter that doesn't take much of your time and is fun to get into.

Can be played with 4x same-pc friends. yay.

Iron Crypticle!

As a standalone game its not bad, but compared to Iron Fisticle it falls flat in an incredible amount of ways.

Pros
>4 player local coop
>Few item redesigns and 3 new weapons
>2 extra special rooms
>2 new bosses (tho the last one is just unfair) and previous bosses now have variations
>theres now a way to revive in multiplayer
>score based levelling system that limits powerups (so now score is useful)

Cons
>There is a hilarious amount of projectile enemies with poorly visible bullets, and not to mention just badly designed enemies as well (slimes are projectile enemies that upon death split into 3 smaller ones, who explode into 3 paralytic bullets, making it impossible to fight them in close range, and also making it impossible to collect food, and then the rail turrets have been given insane movement and shot speed, making them a nightmare where ever they pop up)
>The rooms are considerably larger and darker than in the previous game, which fricks with both the food combo and general item collection, since now you just have to pick one and let the other vapourise, and also with enemy readability, since most of them are in dark colors so the darkness is really not helping.
>Shops and bonus rooms are now full rooms, which means that you have to sacrifice playing regular stages just to visit these. On top of that the bonus rooms give severely diminished treasure compared to Fisticle and vapourise all of ur reward if u die. It luckily allows retries, but in coop it basically means that if 1 person dies, you all have to intentionally die, or else he isnt getting money which he sorely needs. Also the shops are now only selling 4 items max, of which 1 is always hp, and then its random between stats, bonus, gems and iron fisticles/bombs, which means if ur running low on those, you are pretty much screwed, not to mention the crazy price increase compared to the first game and the diminished gold gain.
>All the special rooms now play the same as regular rooms but with diffirent enemy pools (1st game has hunting 1 prespawned wave of skeletons in catacombs and then breaking pots in graveyard, here its just kill all waves of enemies which is lame). There is also no real choice to be made about going in these, since they are vastly easier than default stages and give better rewards, so getting a map and then going thru as many specials as possible is the game plan which is boring.
>Scrolls are a baffling addition since they are mostly items from fisticle that you could get out of golden chests, but now they are rare bomb-like items you can only find in special rooms (except infestation that is), making them extremely situational (not to mention Torpor/time stop has been nerfed so hard from Fisticle that its just useless)
>Permanent upgrades are now gone, which means that casuals will have to sweat like crazy to beat easy mode, if they even understand the food to lvl mechanic at all.
>The gems have been made substantially more boring, since instead of giving you a weapon to annihilate the whole room whilst retaining food for stat maxxing purposes, its just another version of bonus that gives a rather useless barrier and thats it.
>Control settings are suprisingly lackluster, in fisticle you could do 2p keyboard, but here you must have ps4/xbox controllers that you cannot even configure in the game, meaning if you dont like the control scheme you can go dig a ditch.
>Fisticle had (imo) has 3 gameplay options - newgame to first loop with permanent upgrades for full completion to the casual audience, loops in newgame which challenged even the seasoned players, and challenge for a quick rougelike experience. Comparably Cripticle has essentially 2 diffirent version of challenge (newgame and newgame+) since they play exactly like it, and endless mode which just locks you in a room and sends enemies at you which is incredibly lazy compared to the loop.

TL;DR - buy only if you want Iron Fisticle with 4p coop and you have modern controllers, otherwise dont bother.