Weapon of Choice DX

I have a soft spot for small studios that refuse to make boring shooters, and Weapon of Choice DX is exactly the kind of game I want more people to know exists. It started life as an Xbox Live Indie Game back in 2008, and the DX version landed on Steam as a rebalanced, widescreen-updated refresh of that original. The bones are pure Contra DNA - side-scrolling, one-hit kills, relentless alien waves - but Mommy's Best Games has layered on enough ideas to make the game feel genuinely its own. The roster of Solus Operatives is the first thing that sets it apart. You start with three: Xerxes Remington and his Jet Engine Gun that doubles as a propulsion tool, Constance O'Leary whose Arc Knife Launcher fires in two simultaneous arcs, and Moses Longhorn calling down Satellite Lasers from above. Four more operatives are marked MIA at the start, and rescuing them mid-level adds them to your permanent pool. Each character also has a unique double-jump ability - one summons a shadow clone, another turns the jump itself into a weapon - and every weapon has both a primary and a modified alt-fire mode that changes its behavior entirely. That is a lot of mechanical texture for a game in this price range, and experimenting with all of it is genuinely the point. The two signature systems - the Spiderpack and Death Brushing - are worth talking about separately. The Spiderpack is a mechanical backpack that automatically latches you to walls, ceilings, vines, and even enemies, letting you fight from any surface. It sounds gimmicky but it completely reshapes level traversal in the vertical, layered stages. Death Brushing is a bullet-time trigger that activates automatically when a lethal hit is incoming, slowing everything down and highlighting the threat so you can react. A fair criticism is that it occasionally interrupts the kinetic momentum a run-and-gun lives on, and some bosses will still back you into corners regardless. But losing Death Brushing entirely on Mega Death difficulty - one of six tiers running from Easy through Mega Wicked - is a mean and satisfying escalation. Replayability leans on branching paths. Each playthrough runs a story arc of roughly three levels, with exits that fork into different conflict zones and lead to four distinct endings. A single run can be completed well under an hour, which reviewers noted cuts both ways: the game knows its length and never overstays it, but once you have seen all the branches the loop closes faster than it might in a longer campaign. Hidden collectibles - specifically 13 MBG pies scattered across levels - and timed challenge achievements extend the reason to return. The art is hand-drawn, grungy, and full of the kind of hideous creative energy that makes enemies genuinely hard to read against busy backgrounds at times, which is a real annoyance on higher difficulties. The soundtrack is heavy guitar throughout, earnest and punchy rather than atmospheric, though one reviewer found it generic enough to fade into the background. I'd push back on that a little - there is something fitting about the blunt, unpolished energy of the music matching the blunt, unpolished energy of the game itself. This is not a long game and it is not a subtle one. Floaty platforming physics have been a consistent minor complaint across reviews, and the Vengeance Missile you ride into a level on character swap is harder to aim usefully than it sounds. But for players who miss the era when run-and-guns had genuine mechanical ambition on a tiny budget, Weapon of Choice DX is the kind of overlooked gem that rewards the hour or two it asks from you - and then asks you to run it again on Wicked.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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