Enter the Chronosphere

Stick with me here: Superhot as a top-down roguelike with hero characters, Borderlands-style loot, and a visual style similar to something like Void Bastards,. Yes, there’s a lot going on there, but also goddamn, does it work so well. Enter the Chronosphere has got an incredible trick that makes its tactics gameplay gripping: everything moves at the same time. Your character can only take a step at a time, and everything moves (or doesn’t) in lockstep with them. That means that bullets fly across arenas as you move, allowing you to chart a course around or through them, and bombs that are launched by giant machines might not come crashing back down for another handful of steps. You begin every run by picking a character with their own abilities, like a dodge roll or a forceful shout, and a planet with its own difficulty, then proceed through increasingly difficult floors while picking up loot and weaponry that range from the mundane to the extraordinary. I picked up a melee weapon that granted me a combo on one run, and dual pistols that automatically made me strafe as I fired them like I was a character ripped out of The Matrix on another. My absolute favorite was a weapon called a super shotgun alpha, which apparently had infinite ammo, fired from both barrels simultaneously, and also (and this is crucial to my enjoyment of it) unloaded seemingly a few dozen pellets with every pull of the trigger. I simply evaporated everything that dared step into the same room as me.

Enter the Chronosphere is tactical but up-close, measured but also wildly unhinged, and I loved every second of it. — Moises Taveras