Heavy Bullets

I keep coming back to the same thought whenever I load up Heavy Bullets: this is a game built entirely around a single rule, and that rule is quietly brilliant. You carry a six-shot revolver. Each bullet you fire has to be physically retrieved from the floor, or from the body of whatever unfortunate creature you just dropped. Reload manually, one round at a time, and keep moving. That is the whole skeleton of it, and solo developer Terri Vellmann, working out of Sao Paulo and teaching himself Unity from video tutorials, built an entire roguelite FPS around that one constraint. The audacity of it is genuinely charming. What grows from that skeleton is something methodical and tense in a way that the genre rarely is. This is not a game for sprinting through corridors. Rushing into a new area is almost always fatal, thanks to malfunctioning security turrets that blend into the game's blaring neon corridors, and creatures that lunge without warning. Each enemy carries a distinct audio cue, a behavioral pattern worth learning, and a credible threat attached to it because permadeath means every mistake carries weight. Between runs you can deposit money in ATM-style bank kiosks scattered through the levels, purchase items like Life Insurance or a Last Will to carry bullets and cash forward into your next attempt, and spend earnings at vending machines on upgrades including extra health, additional bullets, and bombs. The economy is stingy by design, and randomized shop inventories mean a given run can quietly starve you of what you need. That friction is real, and not always fair. The aesthetic deserves its own paragraph. Low-polygon geometry, a color palette soaked in neon that makes the whole thing feel like a malfunctioning arcade cabinet from another dimension, and a dynamic electronic soundtrack by Doseone that pulses just right under the stress of a nearly-dead run through level seven. The soundscape is the kind of detail that only a person who cared deeply about the atmosphere would get right. It does not just decorate the experience; it is load-bearing. When the music shifts and an enemy closes in, the whole thing clicks into something genuinely atmospheric rather than merely pretty. The honest criticism: Heavy Bullets is thin. Eight levels, one weapon, and a handful of secondary consumable items like homing bombs and proximity locators that critics and players have noted do not meaningfully alter how the core gunplay feels. The reusable-bullet hook is strong enough to carry a few hours, and for some players that loop never gets old. For others, the absence of build variety, the lack of distinct unlockables across runs, and the narrow item pool leave the late sessions feeling samey. A 72 on Metacritic and an OpenCritic average in the mid-70s reflect that split honestly: critics recognized the craft without pretending the content library was deep. This was also Vellmann's first commercial game, and that ambition-to-resources ratio shows at the edges. If you have tolerance for slow, deliberate, punishing FPS runs and you want something that trusts a single mechanic the way almost nothing else does, Heavy Bullets will give you exactly what it promises. If you need build variety, escalating complexity, or a reason to keep running after the first clear, the walls will close in fast. For a solo debut this idiosyncratic, though, the craft here is worth appreciating on its own terms.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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