Super Bullet Break - Playthrough Part 1

Super Bullet Break is a rouge-like deck building game. The story is about different games being corrupted by bugs altering the characters in them and you as Akari have to bring them back to their senses. Each bullet (usually represented by a girl of some sort) as an attack power - which is the damage it does - cost and the various effects it does. It took me a bit to get how the turns work, but your enemies will execute their turn after a specific units of time and when you play one of your bullets the cost is subtracted from that time, so the more costly bullets you play the faster your foes will have a swing at you. Some of your bullets can heal you, cast a temporary shield lasting until your next turn and giving you armour, which can be stacked - all these are essential for surviving, since the game is quite challenging. Each bullet has a cartridge, which gives it different passive abilities like reduced cost or increased attack. Unfortunately you can't really see those in combat (at least not easily), so it's best to just look at the bullet stats before playing it. You go along a grid and choose whether to battle an enemy, go to the shop for new bullets and items, which can be used in-battle, do a quick story event usually involving a bit of dialogue, get some random treasure or rest to restore HP. Battles do give the best rewards, but too many of those will bring you down to low HP before the bosses, which are very tough. The whole game is very challenging - even a regular encounter can murder you if you don't have good luck with your first hand of bullets. You can luck out and earn some pretty good ones, but this doesn't guarantee victory. On the first set of levels I eventually managed to reach the 3rd stage boss, but eventually she starts dishing out attacks capable of one-shotting you, which I thought was too much. The difficulty itself is not a huge problem, but every time after you die you lose everything you earned on your previous playthrough, which is indeed the point of rogue-likes, but your initial deck is frankly shit, and I wish there was some customisation options when you start a new run.