Orbiz

I'll be straight with you: Orbiz is not competing with Nuclear Throne or Enter the Gungeon. It is a micro-budget, first-game effort from a small Indonesian studio, and the moment you load it up that context matters. What it is, underneath all the caveats, is a twin-stick top-down shooter where you pick one of four characters, drop onto a low-poly spherical world, and kill zombies until you find and destroy enough glowing green spawners to unlock a portal to the next planet. Permadeath sends you back to the start. Worlds are procedurally generated each run. That loop is functional and, for about an hour, genuinely fun. The four characters, Ray, Max, Leo, and Ash, each carry a distinct stat perk: more damage, a bigger health pool, extra ammo capacity, or a speed bump. None of them are deep, but the differentiation is real enough that co-op parties will argue over who takes who. The enemy roster has some personality too: basic shambling zombies, exploding types that punish clustering, and poison-spitting spider things that will punish anyone who stands still. There are more than fifteen bosses advertised, and early ones at least have the kind of goofy animations that make you curious what comes next. Destructible environments and gore round out the carnage, though there is no option to toggle the gore off, which some players have flagged as a dealbreaker. Here is where Fred the shooter nerd has to be blunt about the controls: keyboard and mouse is rough. Aiming is inconsistent in a way that has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with the input scheme not being designed for it. The Steam page says a controller is strongly recommended, and that is understating it. It is practically required. With a pad in hand the moment-to-moment shooting feels snappy enough, but the camera chaos during dense zombie piles is real. The screen fills with effects and low-poly debris and it becomes genuinely hard to track your character. On a 144hz monitor it stays readable longer than on a standard 60hz panel, but that should not be a deciding factor for a game at this price tier. The bigger problem is longevity. The core loop does not evolve much. There is no weapon unlock tree, no meta-progression to carry between runs, and no online multiplayer to pull in players who do not own four controllers and a couch full of friends. The roguelite label is accurate only in the broadest sense: randomised worlds plus permadeath, but without the build variety or escalating systems that make genre standouts worth hundreds of hours. The achievement system has a known bug where kill counts do not track, blocking completion. There are also reports of load-screen crashes, particularly on Linux. Anoman Studio picked up a development award from IndieDB back in 2015, and the ambition was clearly there from the start, but the post-launch support trail went cold. Who should actually consider this? Couch co-op fans who have exhausted their local multiplayer catalogue and want something low-friction and cheap. Kids who find the cartoony gore funny rather than grim. Anyone who wants to see what a spherical-world top-down shooter feels like, which genuinely is a novel twist. Solo players, competitive-ranked-ladder types, and anyone who touches a game expecting depth past session two should look elsewhere.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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