Berserk or Die

You have to commend developers who have such a clear creative vision and premise that they can put together their idea and then sell it at such an affordable price tag that it's almost laughable. To this day, the fact that you can snag Vampire Survivors for as little as £4 is unbelievable. It's probably of no surprise then that the immense success of that game has led to its developer, Poncle, to getting into the business of publishing games with an initial foray that seems to hit all the hallmarks of what made Vampire Survivors so popular.

Pixel art direction and style? Check. Shockingly basic yet intuitive control scheme? Check. Affordable price tag? At £3, that's a very big (or little...) check. You don't need me to go any further to understand the sort of experience that Nao Games' Berserk or Die offers, but let me explain all the same.

The actual idea of this title is similar to a survival game like Vampire Survivors. You play as a warrior, one hero left on a battlefield and surrounded by armies of your foes. From here, your goal is to simply survive, to defend yourself through sheer aggression, dipping and diving around the battlefield slaying tens, hundreds, even thousands of enemies along the way. The catch is that unlike most video games, there is next to zero precision with how Berserk or Die plays, as the control scheme is simply framed around smashing your keyboard buttons. We're not talking like how newbies play fighting games, pressing lots of buttons at once in an attempt to look competent, we mean literally smashing one side of your keyboard to get your hero to leap either left or right, attacking foes at the same time. It's a crude, almost Neanderthalic control method, and it works for the most part, even if it can be, as you expect, a little clunky and rough around the edges.

Once you have the controls mastered, which will take all of two minutes, you get to load into a slate of levels and missions where the aim is basically to survive. Each level does have its own theme, be it Ancient Egypt, Mayan, Feudal Japan, the list goes on, but the actual contents of each level are almost all identical. Differing enemy types - which are visually unique depending on the level - attack from left and right flanks, and you simply have to kill them before they strike you. Survive for a full day, and a merchant spawns enabling you to spend coins dropped from defeated foes on upgrades, be it more damage, extra health, additional automatic attack abilities, the list goes. Then, when you exit the store, you return to war to survive another day. On the fifth day (a typical each day lasts around a minute), a boss level foe spawns, and this is about the one area, besides a visual overhaul, where each level differs, as the bosses attack in different ways, even if your counterattack method does not change: i.e. leaping left and right by smashing your keyboard just hard enough that you don't break it in two or punch a hole in your desk.

It's simple, very simple at that, but hey, this game has a very clear vision of what it wants to be, and from a design and mechanical perspective it achieves that vision with flying colours. Does it work and is it effective? In part. There is entertainment value, enough that it will keep you engaged for upwards of an hour at a time, however, there's no denying that this won't be the same indie sensation as say, Vampire Survivors. If you're even marginally curious about how such an unorthodox game performs in practice, I'd simply suggest checking it out, because with Berserk or Die you could either permanently add a game to your collection, or get half a pack of V-Bucks... I know what I'd prefer to do with my money.