Raspberry Mash

Genre: Roguelike Top-Down Action / 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Raspberry Mash is a Top-Down Action game with Roguelike and 2-Stick Shooter elements released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2021. In this game, players take the role of a young woman cast down into a hellish prison by a destructive god who fears a mysterious power she has, which may have something to do with the strange red creature that has grafted itself onto the spot where her left arm once was.

The presentation in Raspberry Mash is pretty good, using pixel art visuals with tons of enemies on-screen and a lot of pixelated blood and body parts flying. The game mostly backs this with an atmospheric soundtrack, though you do occasionally get appropriate but forgettable themes for the game’s intro and boss themes.

The gameplay in Raspberry Mash has elements in common with other great games in the genre, evoking memories of games like Enter the Gungeon and Hades. However, it’s not anywhere near on par with those games.

On the positive side of things, this game does an excellent job making melee attacks feel visceral and fun, especially when you get a weapon that allows you to get in devastating combos, or plunge through enemies at high speed. There’s also some good potential for the Roguelike elements in this game to flourish, with a lot of permanent upgrades in-between stages.

On the negative side of things… ranged weapons in this game suck. It’s not only that these weapons have limited ammo and require players to reload them in combat, it’s that most of these weapons require you to charge the weapon up for a second or two before you can even fire off a single shot. When enemies start to swarm around you, you’ll find it’s much easier to rely on your melee weapon most of the time, as this usually stuns enemies to keep them from attacking, and rather than slowing down as you use them the way you do with guns, you can often find yourself speeding up as you melee through enemies.

You could perhaps just play exclusively with melee attacks, but the game throws a wrench in these plans whenever you encounter an enemy with their own projectile attack, since you cannot deflect these with melee attacks, you can only dodge them. And while it’s easy to transition from one melee attack into another, it’s not so easy to transition from melee into the dodge roll that can help you to avoid damage. Basically, whenever you’re dealing with an enemy that has a ranged weapon, it feels like you need to switch from playing very aggressively to very defensively and be prepared for the fast pacing of the game to crash.

Another problem is the Roguelike elements, which I praised earlier for providing plenty of options. Unfortunately, the various weapons and passive upgrade relics you can get are usually either boring, useless, or both. Yes, melee weapons like gloves and swords that allow you to thrust yourself forward are great… but then you’ll get an axe that makes you a sitting duck while you slowly swing it, or a knife that’s fast but with only a minor advantage in range that doesn’t make up for the speed and combo potential that comes with fist weapons. In any case, the Roguelike stuff here is a far cry from the creativity of power-ups in games like The Binding of Isaac, or the empowering stacking potential of power-ups in Hades.

In the end, Raspberry Mash is a decent but flawed Roguelike and Top-Down Action game that will ultimately make you crave one of the countless other, better games in the genre. To be clear, it’s not that Raspberry Mash is bad. It’s that you have so many better alternatives that there just doesn’t seem like much of a reason to go with this game.

tl;dr – Raspberry Mash is a Top-Down Action game with Roguelike and 2-Stick Shooter elements. Unfortunately, while the melee in this game is really fun and visceral, the ranged weaponry is pretty terrible, and the way the game forces you to slow down to contend with ranged threats wrecks the game’s pacing. This is definitely not a bad entry in this genre, but there are just far too many other better games in this genre to waste your time with this one.

Grade: C+

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