Demons with Shotguns

I spend a lot of time thinking about netcode, tick rates, and whether ranked lobbies are rigged against me at 2am. Demons with Shotguns does not care about any of that, and honestly, that is its whole point. This is a 2D local-only arena shooter built for the couch, not the cloud, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can appreciate what it actually does well. The mechanical core is tighter than it has any right to be for a pixel-art indie. You pick from six characters - the Preacher, the Demon, the Angel, the Deceiver, the Nun, or Death himself - and the stat differences are minimal. What actually separates players is execution: shotgun range is deliberately short, so every engagement becomes a close-range game of nerves. You dash in to fire, shield to deflect a counter-shot back at the sender, use the double-jump to stay unpredictable, or burn a shotgun-jump to reach a high platform and change the angle of attack. Ammo is finite, which forces aggression toward ammo boxes and creates constant map pressure. The time-to-kill is brutal and instant, which is exactly how it should be. No bloated health bars here. The mode list is legitimately generous for a game at this price tier: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Soul Reaping, Capture the Soul, King of the Soul, Last Soul Standing, and team variants for most of them. King of the Soul is the standout - hold the soul, earn a point every five seconds, try not to get disassembled by three people who suddenly agree on something. Last Soul Standing works in theory but tends to die fast without a full room of competitive players. The End of Times horde mode is there for solo or two-player sessions, throwing escalating waves of zombies, hellhounds, and harpies at you. It serves its purpose as a warmup or a fallback when a third controller goes missing, but it is not the main event. Tarot cards spawn randomly across arenas and keep matches from going stale. Angel Wings let you fly. Super Speed tends to punish whoever picks it up as much as the opponents. The Possessed card locks your fire direction and turns you into a liability to yourself. Sands of Time slows everyone down equally, which sounds like chaos and is. None of these are gimmicks you can safely ignore - they flip the momentum of a round and generate the kind of loud, stupid moments that make people actually remember a game night. The 40 arenas across four environments have their own hazards and platform layouts, which matters once you start reading sightlines and abusing the geometry with shotgun-jumps. The honest problem is one nobody will pretend does not exist: there is no online multiplayer, and there never has been. On PC in 2016, that was an acceptable trade-off. In 2026, it means this game is priced and purchased entirely around whether you can physically put bodies on a couch. Solo players have End of Times and nothing else of substance. No bot support for the competitive modes. If that condition is not met regularly in your life, this game will sit unplayed. Steam reviews are thin - fewer than twenty total - which tells you the PC player base is small, though the sentiment is positive. Remote Play Together could soften the local-only restriction if both parties have solid connections, but that is a workaround, not a solution. What it is, within its actual scope, is a clean, fast, readable arena shooter that rewards players who understand positioning and timing, looks sharp in pixel-art, and sounds good thanks to a synthwave score from VHS Glitch. It does not overstay its welcome and does not pretend to be something it is not.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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