After 150+ hours in this game and 30 hours being for the past two weeks here is my honest review :

This game used to be very fun when it came out and i'd see everybody play it back then. It is simple, full of memes and funny characters, items,etc and you get to compete with your steam friends thanks to the leaderboards. BUT the game has many issues and balance problems. Ever since launch there has been metas and so every now and then the dev needs to adjust the characters because otherwise people wouldn't play other characters and until recently there wasn't even any reason to even attempt the Desert Tier 3 map (before the achievement with Amog). We got the first real update (the halloween one) around christmas... after that we got a few more updates recently, thankfully, adding more achievements and customizations. But those achievements are for some of them ridiculously tidious and RNG based. You need to get a 300K kills run, beat the final boss of Desert Tier 3 (the hardest map) with Amog (one of the slowest characters) after grabbing 8 commun moldy cheese and a legendary snake item. I've been at this challenge for now 20+ hours. There are many items, weapons and tomes that pretty much nobody uses but that you cannot turn off in the collection like regen tome and the luck has been significantly nerfed. You can still grab commun items after 300+ Luck and the Green Credit Cards (increase your Luck by 2% per chest) now also increase the chests prices by 10% EACH.

Now i'm sure this game is very fun for people who play casually and don't mind bad rng or bad luck but i feel like most people who stay on the game now are people who go for highscores using the same metas and get achievements by watching videos and tutorials done by BB_Smooth and other very good players. I don't feel that the game is as beginner friendly as it once was for players who just want the game platinumed or their Steam display. Not to mention that you get very often bodyblocked/soft locked on ennemies in this game unlike Vampire Survivors where you can go through ennemies while taking damage. Here you just get stuck and soft locked. The ennemies categories are also randoms so sometimes you'll have fast ennemies such as the demons on forest or skeleton tumbleweeds in Desert spawning early on and being faster than the player.

All of this + the inconsistent hitboxes and mobility advantage for players who can bunny hop (for those who cannot do it or are or controller good luck to have the ghost skins) make the game very frustrating at time. it doesn't feel fun to play anymore but just obligatory to try to 100% the game. Not to mention that everytime i check at Steam discussions about this game i always see disrespectufl people in the comments. It is one of those games where you are not free to have your opinion or express a disliking in it. I don't want to put everyone in the same basket but the Steam community of this game (in the discussions) is somehow worse than most Reddits communities and Twitter, which is very unfortunate.

Overall i'll say i used to really like this game and besides everything i just said i still like it to a certain degree because it's like a drug BUT lately i've had wayyyy more fun playing "Vampire Survivors", the game that inspired Megabonk. Vampire Survivors cost 5€ (so half of Megabonk's price) and the DLC s come to a total of 10€ and offer a ridiculous ammount of new characters, weapons,items,etc. The game might be in 2D but pretty much everything in it has been copied in Megabonk. The garlic item is Chad's Aura in Megabonk, The music selection is the boom box in Megabonk, the ability to refresh, ban,skip items and upgrades,etc but even if it's in 2D i'm having way more fun in Vampire Survivors. It is simple, fun, challenging and way less buggy and unfair.

I'll say this in Megabonk's defense though : this is done by a single dev and they actually added the addons/items on top of weapons and Tomes, which is way more inventory that we can carry than in Vampire Survivors. Megabonk does offer way more boost items, Charged shrines buffs,etc.

All of this to say, Megabonk is a fun game but i really hope they optimize it, keep updating it with new achievements, hats, characters (especially this please), rebalance the game overall and that the community can be a bit less agressive over time and stop insulting each others. I also hope the Desert map gets somehow reworked a bit because i swear it is way more difficult than Forest and no one plays it unless it is for a challenge. The main reason why my expereince has been so frustrating the past 30 hours i played this game the past 2 weeks is because i'm stuck on that Amog challenge in Desert.

Absolutely BONKERS!

I do not wish to review the game negatively. Megabonk is a fun experience and starts off with such depth that you feel the game may continue endlessly; the sheer quantity of characters, weapons, and items makes it something that genuinely provides variety through combinations and "trying everything at least once." However, the game ends up being this tedious reset-slop instead of an engaging experience that has you think about anything but a "good start." Did I get a certain weapon before the first mini-boss? I'll probably not have enough time to clear the map and get any good gear then, better retry. Did I not get a credit card early? Better reset then. A lot of my grievances are with the "upper" end of the game, but apply to the rest as well.

To start on my complaints, the characters aren't created equally--some gain benefits with certain criteria or infinitely more useful stats, while others gain middling utility or defensive stats like health, lifesteal, or armor (which, at some point, will not keep you alive when you get one-shot by enemies). Why does Robinette gain bonus gold per level AND gain an amount of damage per gold stored, but the lifesteal stacker, Vlad, doesn't gain anything based on healing, lifesteal, or max hp. Not unless you use the LEGENDARY item, Bloody Cleaver, that gives you bloodmark. And even that doesn't scale into the later levels. Is lifesteal that op without relics that it warrants being the exclusive buff on that character? Same question to armor and health. Some characters have a unique gimmick, like Megachad and his Flex that stuns enemies and gives a damage buff during, or the bird guy and his floating + airborne damage, but thats pretty much it. And why nerf certain characters like Noelle? Why not buff the others? In a game about absurdity and "breaking" the game by being extremely strong, you would think every character would have some capacity to become strong.

Another thing is the stats that are deemed "necessary" to getting a proper build/being sufficiently powerful enough to beat the final boss. Difficulty should increase as the run continues, especially when the ghosts arrive. Perhaps exclusively when they arrive, as to better implement a "risk/reward" mechanic, instead of every single person wanting to take Difficulty Tome. Because, if I don't take it, I don't kill enough enemies to get enough levels to get enough damage to beat the enemies that are bottlenecks (minibosses and final bosses). Why do I need a tome for more enemies to spawn? Chaos Tome is a fun idea, and I love how big a boost it can give me--I think the randomness of it is relatively fair, but since tomes go to level 99, you are essentially using it as an extra series of Charge Shrines. You don't need a level 99 Size Tome, but you want SOME size? Chaos. Attack Speed? You don't need 500%, so probably Chaos again. It does so many things well, that it makes sinking any slots into the other tomes lacking. Namely because there are some stats you cannot improve via tomes--only Charge Shrines, character buffs, or items. It becomes the best because of how strong it makes you EFFORTLESSLY, and for that reason I think it is too strong. Otherwise, you might actually see some variety in the builds! And let's not get started on luck stacking. Why? Because luck will make or break you. Higher luck means better upgrades on level up, from Moai, from Charge Shrines, and from chests. Without luck, you lose. It is, by far, the most useful stat. There is a monotony to builds due to the fact that these few tomes just sit above ALL the others.

And the worst part is that weapons are no different! Most are considered suboptimal due to how crit works. Crit does more crit the more crit chance you have, as well as more critical damage. If you have a 10x damage multiplier, 100% crit chance, and 2x crit damage, you would deal (effectively) 20x damage! Now, if you have 10x damage multiplier, 100% crit chance, and 4x crit damage (which, by the way, stacks far more easily since it is based on a 2.0 instead of 1.0, meaning "10% bonus" is .2 instead of .1), you are dealing substantially more damage--40x instead. Obviously, this is basic math, but MOST weapons cannot stack critical chance OR critical damage! Would you be surprised to know the ones that do are the most powerful weapons? Because they enable you to use crit chance as a (relative) dump stat! Who needs crit when the weapons can stack it themselves? And Dice gaining PERMANENT critical chance every time it hits a 6 (for context, it can roll 1 through 6)? Some weapons start weaker, but their ceiling is nigh infinite. Other weapons start strong, like the buffed Dragon's Breath, but they end up being the weakest of the bunch due to their inability to stack critical stats. ANY weapon that does not stack critical will net you less damage in the long run than any that does. Why do all the weapons not have critical chance and damage? Or, at the least, critical chance? I like the variety of stats: projectiles, size, damage, speed, etc. But, I think the items need to have more variety in them by being equally usable. Attacks utilizing duration should have more duration to start with, as to maintain viability with attacks that have a higher attack speed on base level. If I am forced to use a certain weapon on a character, I should expect it to be good. Instead, the disparity of the weapons means some characters suck way more than others. Should the values be the same? Probably not! I would expect the Katana to have a higher critical chance than Aura or Aegis, but I think the viability SHOULD be there. Single target items should be able to crit more often, but AoE shouldn't suffer because it can hit more people! That's Bananas! And EVEN THEY CAN'T CRIT! Hell, even if the Axe ONLY got critical damage, I think that this would be a better alternative to it getting neither! Weapons without crit will be good with investment into the Precision Tome, but you have to sacrifice the things that get you overpowered to do that.

The achievements (even for skins) are monotonous after some point. To the extreme that, if you want to be able to play with everything, you might as well cheat to do it. Some are as simple as, "Find X item!" or, "Level up X item to a certain amount!" But others are, "Play X character, get Y item, and then fulfill Z criterion to get a new item!" or, "Speedrun this randomized tileset with bunny hops just to unlock a skin--but most of the maps are completely impossible to perform this on, so guess what? Reset until you get the PERFECT map to get your sub 22 second run on your preferred character so you can be cyan." Unlocks should feel rewarding--not like I have to understand every tileset in the crypt to best manipulate it to my advantage. Doing it makes you slightly better at bunny hops in general, but it is generally so draining to try and reset again and again and again. I want to feel like I am striving and attaining something, not that I have to RESET RESET RESET until I get the win condition. If I wanted to reset a game repeatedly, I would go shiny hunt on a Pokemon game. At least then the reward isn't something you forget about as easy.

All in all, the game takes a lot of elements from similar games, as noted by other reviews (namely from Vampire Survivors and Risk of Rain 2), but it does not implement them together well. Megabonk feels like it requires skill to play optimally, but in truth it just requires extreme patience and constant resetting to get the optimal build so you can AFK for an hour to grind up kills. I enjoy the aspect of getting good at a new game, I enjoy learning and mastering characters, builds, or simply the game itself--Megabonk made me dislike it heavily due to the sheer luck required to be "good." For that reason, I cannot recommend it as it currently stands.