Best Buds vs Bad Guys

I wanted to root for this one. The origin story alone is the kind of thing that makes indie games worth paying attention to: a dad and his kid, who call each other 'best bud', building an 11-world 16-bit run-and-gun together because they both loved Contra, Mega Man, and Ghosts 'n Goblins growing up. That sincerity comes through in the pixel art, the chiptune soundtrack, and an enemy roster that genuinely feels like it was sketched out in a school notebook. The problem is that sincerity and playability are not the same thing. The core loop is side-scrolling run-and-gun with a light exploration layer bolted on top. Each level asks you to track down three exit fragments before you can face the boss, which sounds like a reasonable way to add some Metroidvania texture to a straight shooter. In practice, fragment placement is sometimes cryptic to the point of frustration, with visual cues that blend into the background and paths that require backtracking without signposting it clearly. Community players have noted having to ctrl-alt-del out after levels due to crashes that nonetheless preserved progress, and a boss arena in the second world that could be cheesed from outside its boundary due to a collision bug. These are not minor rough edges; they are the kind of thing that stops a session cold. Where the game earns genuine credit is in its weapon variety and boss fights. The inventory system lets you hoard every weapon and support item you find across a level, then bring the whole lot into a boss encounter and unload freely. Shrink-rays, ice-cream blasters, buzzsaw guns, homing missiles, banana napalm, and donuts of death are all in the arsenal, and the absurdist naming reflects the kid-brain energy that clearly drove the design. Boss fights reward players who actually stockpile rather than spray-and-pray, and that loop of collecting weird weapons then watching them interact with a large themed enemy is the game at its best. The chiptune soundtrack has a genuine warmth to it, the kind of composed-in-a-bedroom quality that fits the project's origins rather than working against them. The harder truth is that the Steam reception sits firmly in mostly negative territory after years on the platform, and achievement data suggests most players drop out before clearing even the earliest sections. There is a REPLAY+ mode for a harder second run, but it's a feature that assumes players finished once and want more, which the numbers suggest very few do. If you have a high tolerance for unpolished indie releases and a specific nostalgia for the Contra era, there are moments here that land. For everyone else, the genre has better-executed options that do not require debugging workarounds mid-session.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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