Shard Squad

My instinct with games this small and this cheerful is to worry they're thin. Shard Squad surprised me. The Root Studios built something that sits right at the crossroads of two resurgent genres - the bullet-heaven survivor and the creature collector - and the fusion holds together better than it has any right to at this price point. The setup is straightforward: you play through escalating arenas set in the world of Mellunia, dodging dense projectile patterns while your squad of elemental creatures called Shards auto-attacks around you. There are over 20 Shards to unlock across five elemental types - Fire, Water, Electric, Nature, and Crystal - and each one carries three distinct traits. Stack matching traits across your roster and you unlock compounding bonuses that genuinely change how a run feels. You start each run with a single creature and a single attack, which sounds thin until a boss dies and you recruit what drops. Suddenly you have a fire-type lobbing cones of flame next to a water-type with bouncing bubble shots, and then the relic you grabbed two waves back starts interacting with both. That slow bloom from nothing into something ridiculous is exactly where the game lives. The difficulty, though, is where Shard Squad earns its asterisk. At launch, enemies could match or even beat your base movement speed, and the meta-progression currency required to purchase meaningful defensive upgrades between runs felt genuinely steep. The Steam community flagged it immediately, and it remains the chief criticism across player reviews. The game has kept a Very Positive rating overall - sitting around 83 percent positive from several hundred reviews - which suggests the core loop is strong enough to hold people through the friction, but new players should know the early runs can feel punishing before the build clicks. Timed mid-run minigames, like flower-collecting or single-target elimination challenges, offer a clutch heal or currency edge that helps, but they are not a full solution to the balance tension. What keeps me recommending it despite that is the handcraft visible throughout. The director Rennan Costa has been transparent that the characters were designed to be loved individually, not just min-maxed. Each Shard carries its own story thread and lore ties to others in the roster, and some character interactions are quietly rewarded with bonuses if you happen to pair the right creatures. That kind of intentionality is rare in a genre that usually treats its units as interchangeable stat sticks. The pixel art is clean and readable even when the screen fills up, and the local co-op mode - genuinely elevating according to early players - is a good reason to pull a friend onto the couch. A free demo is also available on Steam if you want to test the feel before committing. Shard Squad is for players who like their action games to have a strategic backbone, who enjoy spending the first twenty minutes of a run figuring out what kind of build is even possible today. It is not for players who expect to feel overpowered from minute one - at least not yet, while balance patches continue to roll in. The potential sitting inside this small game is obvious, and The Root Studios are clearly listening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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