Sodaman

I went into Sodaman expecting a budget joke game with a fizzy gimmick stapled onto a Vampire Survivors clone. What I got instead was a top-down bullet-heaven with genuine mechanical ambition, a dark-comedy cyberpunk personality, and a build system that held my attention far longer than its low-key price tag suggests. The premise is ridiculous on purpose: a catastrophe called the Sodacalypse has flattened every carbonated drink in existence, and you are Sodaman, a sarcastic cybernetic supersoldier on a planet-hopping mission to find what's left of the good stuff. It plays as dumb as it sounds, and that's entirely the point. Where Sodaman separates itself from the genre crowd is in two places. First, combat is more active than most bullet-heaven games: you aim, shoot, reload, and dodge manually rather than watching auto-fire handle everything while you juke around. That alone makes runs feel more engaged. Second, the build architecture is legitimately deep. Soda powers are color-coded across multiple types, each carrying 10-plus skills you can slot during a run. They come in five rarity tiers from common to artifact, and the stat gap between rarities is steep enough that finding a high-tier version of your preferred type genuinely changes a run's ceiling. Layer on top of that a deck of over 40 enhancement cards clearly inspired by Balatro's joker structure, plus a cybernetics system that lets you augment six separate body parts with more than 50 upgrades in total, and you have a game where back-to-back runs can feel structurally different. Between runs, you return to your spaceship hub to spend credits on new weapons, visit crew members who serve as vendors and upgrade contacts, and choose your next planetary operation. Each planet runs three difficulty tiers with distinct objectives and boss encounters, capped by a Chaos Mode that ramps the pressure considerably. The first planet, Crystal Heaven, pits you against sentient crystal enemies that shatter with satisfying crunch sounds. The 1.0 release added a third planet, Kali'ghar, along with Duo Sodas that fuse two soda color types into single explosive brews, and a Black Soda class built around darkness and void effects. It's a meaningful content jump from the early access build. There are genuine caveats. The community has flagged the AI-generated voice acting, and the characters' delivery is noticeably mechanical in a way that undercuts the game's otherwise confident personality. A portion of recent Steam reviews specifically call this out, and it's a fair criticism: the writing has enough dark-comedy bite that live voice work would have served it better. Some critics also noted that even with all the soda theming, the actual abilities don't always feel as fizzy or weird as the premise promises. The builds get complex, but the fantasy sometimes outpaces the visual execution. Buyers going in for a purely aesthetic sugar rush may come out slightly flat. That said, for a 1.0 release from a four-person team, Sodaman holds together well. The Steam reception has settled around a solid mostly positive range across several hundred reviews, which for a genre this crowded is a decent signal. The core loop of hunt-for-builds, get overwhelmed, die smarter next time is well-tuned, the difficulty levels give newcomers and veterans a workable on-ramp, and the Balatro-style card layer adds a strategic wrinkle that fans of that game will recognize immediately. If you want something with the casual approachability of a short-session roguelike but enough build complexity to keep a theory-crafter occupied, Sodaman earns its place on the shortlist.

Alex · Scout Team

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