Never Not Shooting

My honest first reaction to Never Not Shooting was that it felt like someone had distilled the Geometry Wars formula down to its barest bones and then cranked the enemy density until the screen was barely readable. That is not a criticism. For a certain kind of player, that sentence alone should be enough to hit the buy button. You pick a ship, select your loadout from a pool of weapons that includes homing missiles and a proximity laser (the latter being, in my opinion, the smartest pick for solo survival since it handles collision damage you would otherwise eat constantly), and then you plant yourself between a glowing central sun and an ever-escalating swarm of enemies flying in from every edge of the screen. The goal is simple: protect the sun, rack up score, survive as long as you can. The loop is tight in a way that only old-school arcade design gets right. Enemies do not come in fixed patterns. Spawns are randomized, which keeps runs from feeling memorized, and the difficulty ramp is gradual enough that you can actually find your footing before things go completely sideways. Once they do go sideways, and they will, rounds can stretch to ten minutes or more, which is a meaningful amount of time for a game with no checkpoints or progression carry-over between sessions. The controls reportedly feel responsive throughout, which in this genre is the absolute floor requirement. A twin-sticker with input lag is just a frustration machine. The build variety is where the game has some real staying power. Weapon combinations interact differently depending on how many players are in the lobby, which means the four-player local co-op is genuinely not the same game as the solo run. In co-op you are actively competing for the experience pickups that enemies drop, which funds your ship upgrades mid-run. That competitive tension inside a cooperative framework is a smart wrinkle. It creates organic disagreements about who gets the XP, which is exactly the kind of moment a good couch game needs. The achievement list apparently leans into this, with several tied directly to how you perform against your friends. Where it falls short is equally straightforward. There is no meaningful tutorial. The upgrade system sitting in the corner of the screen does not explain itself, and the pickups you collect from kills are not labeled. For a game explicitly rooted in arcade traditions, that is probably an intentional choice, but it still costs time you could have spent actually playing. The other limitation is harder to ignore in 2025: this is strictly local-only. No online play, no remote co-op support listed. If you have three other people in the same room with controllers, this is exactly what it wants to be. If your friends are online, you are on your own, and a solo session, while functional, misses the point. For what it is, Never Not Shooting does its job without pretension. It is a score-attack, couch co-op arcade shooter with tight controls, a punishing difficulty curve, and zero padding. It will not replace your competitive shooters, and it was never trying to. What it offers is a 20-minute window of pure, focused chaos, best experienced with controllers already in hand and someone's drink dangerously close to the edge of the table.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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