Although I like the name "bullet heaven" for automatic survival shooters like Vampire Survivors, I understand that people prefer other denominations, like "horde survival" or simply "survivor-likes", and it's fine. But I never understood why people call those games roguelites.

Yes, you start a new build every time you play, but the goal of the game isn't finish a "complete run", but unlock all the options and complete the maps in different ways. For me, at least, this sense of progression and discovery is one of the reasons that bullet heaven games amuse me, opposed the mastery through repetition that comes from roguelikes.

It was expecting this feeling that I started playing Geometry Survivor and I was surprised of how the game, in fact, had way more inspirations in roguelikes that I imagined. Your main goal is to finish a 20-minute run in the only map available, collecting experience points to get new weapons and abilities from a limited pool of options. Unless you are already a master of the game, you will not do this in your first time, so you can use credits to get permanent upgrades (or different ships).

Talking like that doesn't show any problems, but there is a lot of content missing to be able to assume any of the definitions with quality. For a bullet heaven, having only one map and no unlockables besides bumping up some basic attributes makes the experience too monotone, with no tangible progression between matches. For a roguelite, there's not a lot of options to differentiate one run from another, with too similar challenges and builds. It feels like Geometry Survivor is a demo version of a bigger game that never existed.

The sad thing about all this is because playing a run of Geometry Survivor is really fun! Different from others in the genre, you already starts a run with a lot of speed and power, what helps to create a more incisive and direct approach when destroying the first enemies. The idea of special mines dropping in the map, that can be exploded as the last resort against an enemy wave, is really cool too and incentivize the player to be more aware of the map instead of just running.

Visually, I also loved the neon aesthetic and the inspiration in vector games. It helps a lot to see what's going on because of the black background, but the lack of detail makes hard to differentiate enemy types. I would love to see the game going further in the geometric theme, having different arenas inspired by shapes and other concepts like parallelism. Or even inspired by old vector games, like an Asteroids one? I can only dream.

One of the worst feelings as a player is seeing a game that's good to play, but in a hour you already has seen everything it has to offer. Geometry Survivor has all that needs to be a sprout of a great title in the bullet heaven (or roguelite, if you want) genre, but the lack of content and depth makes it really easy to forget about. Of course, you can just love how the gameplay feels like (because it feels really good) and keep replaying the same level until you finish a perfect run, but with so much more complete experiences in the market, it's hard to recommend it.