ANVIL

I came into ANVIL expecting a tight twin-stick shooter with roguelite legs, and for the first handful of runs that's pretty much what it delivers. The top-down bullet hell combat moves at a pace that keeps you honest, dodge timing matters, relic synergies can either carry a run or leave you face-down in the third planet, and the boss fights are scaled-up spectacles that demand you actually read your build before you walk in. The core loop scratches a very specific itch: pick a Breaker, blast through procedurally generated planets, stack relic buffs, and see how far you get before something one-shots you. The Breaker roster is the game's best argument for replayability. Classes play genuinely differently from each other. Soldier-style Breakers handle like classic twin-stick fare, decent rifles, shotguns, a balanced stat spread. Heavy units lean into melee or flamethrower-type weapons and take real investment to make sing, but when they click, the power ceiling is high. Support classes go full glass cannon: dual-wielded pistols and charging cannons, almost no health, completely frantic. Over 100 randomly generated relics feed into this system, and finding the right weapon-relic pairing is where the game's depth actually lives. A well-tuned run feels great. A poorly-itemised one feels punishing in ways that aren't always fair, and progression balance has been a recurring criticism from the community throughout the game's life. The multiplayer picture is where I have to pump the brakes hard. ANVIL's co-op is built for up to three players, and the game genuinely plays better with a coordinated squad. The problem is population. Steam concurrent player numbers peaked around 3,000 and have dropped sharply since launch. Matchmaking in random lobbies has historically been unreliable, and that's a real structural problem for a game that is fundamentally designed around co-op synergy. A PVP mode was added at the 1.0 launch, which is a fine addition on paper, but with thin server population it barely registers as a functional mode right now. The developers have acknowledged matchmaking issues post-launch and pushed fixes, but this is the kind of thing that only a sustained playerbase can actually solve. On the technical side, ANVIL runs cleanly on modest hardware, a GTX 1660 Ti handles it without breaking a sweat, so you're not looking at a performance-hungry title. The art direction is polished for its budget tier, with a slick sci-fi aesthetic and enemy variety across different planet biomes that stops runs from feeling visually identical. What it lacks is personality at a narrative level: there's essentially no lore delivered in-run, voice acting is thin outside of the AI companion I.O. added at v1.0, and the world doesn't give you much reason to care beyond the next relic drop. For a shooter player, that's fine, but it means ANVIL lives and dies entirely on gameplay repetition, and weapon balance issues mean some runs devolve into the same optimal weapon picks rather than genuine build variety. Solo, ANVIL is a decent distraction for a few sessions. With two friends who are in the habit of logging in regularly, it punches noticeably higher. The honest verdict though: this game needed a bigger, stickier community than it found, and that gap is increasingly hard to ignore in 2025. Fred, Scout Team