TinyShot

I have a soft spot for games that arrive quietly, carrying the whole weight of one person's obsession, and TinyShot is exactly that kind of release. Allaith Hammed, a solo developer who goes by ZAX, built this 2D wave-based arcade shooter as a direct love letter to Edmund McMillen's work, and that lineage is impossible to miss from the first level. The cartoony-grotesque underworld aesthetic, the goofy enemy designs, the gory slapstick energy - if you spent time with The Binding of Isaac or Super Meat Boy, you will feel something familiar the moment you boot this up. The core loop is wave survival with a side order of platforming aggression. Each level throws escalating crowds of underworld creatures at Tiny, and you clear them with a rotating mix of guns and melee weapons picked up between rounds. What gives the combat its personality is the movement kit: a dash and a grapple gun that let you zip around arenas with surprising speed. The grapple is a little inconsistent on range-reading, and it takes a few deaths before it clicks, but once it does, stringing together dashes and hooks to dodge incoming fire while repositioning for a shot feels genuinely satisfying. The game's honest tension comes from ammo scarcity - when you run dry mid-wave, you are forced to lean on mobility alone, which some players find exhilarating and others find momentum-breaking. It is the sharpest design friction in the game and the one most worth knowing about going in. The boss fights are where TinyShot earns its keep. They are big, bullet-hell-adjacent affairs against oversized underworld creatures, and they demand a real combination of reflex, pattern reading, and a small amount of luck. The difficulty spike is steep compared to the regular waves, but that contrast is part of the charm - these moments feel like ZAX showing off, and the craft underneath the rougher edges is visible here. Enemy variety across the regular waves is decent, and the random item drops between fights add a light roguelike unpredictability that keeps repeated runs from feeling identical. The art style is the one area where the McMillen influence tips from homage toward derivative. Some enemy designs sit uncomfortably close to Isaac's visual vocabulary, and players who know that game well will notice. It is a limitation worth flagging, not to dismiss the work, but because ZAX's own creative instincts - present in the movement design and the boss choreography - are genuinely more interesting than the borrowed aesthetic suggests. The soundtrack, composed by Luigi-Maria Rapisarda, leans into a 16-bit operatic register that suits the underworld carnival mood well, and it is one of the things I kept listening to after putting the game down. TinyShot is a short game. It does not overstay its welcome, and at the budget price point it lands at now, that brevity is a feature rather than a flaw. It is rough in places, clearly a debut, and the action has gaps in its pacing that a second title from this developer will likely fix. But there is real handcraft here, real momentum in the best sequences, and a creator worth watching. If you are the kind of player who roots for the underdog on their first serious swing, this one is worth your evening. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified.

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