I have respect for all shrimp that have to go through this kind of punishment on the daily.

A game that narrowly avoids a thumbs down by virtue of being free, Shrimp.io is a neat proof of concept still getting updates as of a week ago, though it'll need several more to iron out the flaws. It's fun for a bit less than an hour, about the length of time you need to do a few runs and realize which power ups are imbalanced.

You're a shrimp, avoid and shoot other sealife, gather plastic. Shrimple and pure, nothing but Vampire Survivors style gameplay here. Unfortunately there's also nothing here in any way to separate Shrimp from an absolutely bloated genre. Flat featureless infini-map, generic enemies that advance on you, the 8 or so basic weapons that every bullet heaven has. Have I mentioned Shrimp is a decent proof of concept and it's free? That's all that really saves it, it's neat in the same way old flash games used to be.

What peels this shrimp is that the power ups are poorly balanced, the same 2-3 weapons win the round every time, many options are so poor as to be traps(+experience, defense instead of offense, etc) and some features like the endless mode simply don't work. My experience with endless is that the same starter waves spawned forever and I let the game run AFK for over an hour once I had anchors and oil spill. I played a few Doom levels instead, which really highlights how engaging Shrimp is. Shrimp.io: you can play better games at the same time! This does give you an option to grind the optimistically bad kill count achievements, at least. The highest is 2.5 million total kills, you can get 10-20k per 15 minute normal run if you're lucky, a small boo to the dev for not adjusting these numbers. Should probably be "beat map 1, beat map 2, get 1/5/10/25/50/100k kills." Shrimp does not have 10+ hours of appeal to it, let alone an hour of content!

It's still a nice enough little game that looks and plays fine, has a good retro feel and soundtrack, free to try. It just never goes much of anywhere and is outclassed by the $5 OG and every other $10 or less titan in the same genre.

shreempa