Rightfully, Beary Arms: Early Access Preview: "Feels A Tad Too Early"

New twinstick-shooter action-roguelite forges ahead in its Early Access lifespan with the recent update «Claws & Paws,» but it’s still a hard game to parse at the best of times. From its grating title to its ungainly gameplay, it never situates successfully within the sizable genre it shares. At this stage of ' development, Boston-based Daylight Basement Studio’s debut is left grasping at straws.

takes inspiration from plenty of contemporary genre hits. There are whiffs of classics and peppered throughout, but the gameplay issues, bugs, and overall incoherent design confuse any confident comparison. The disjointed and muddy pixel art (which pairs poorly with the 3D level geometry), shallow mechanical depth, and gummy controls all need an update to be ready for prime time, with its Early Access label seeming yet premature at this stage.

Players star as a bear in green pajamas named “Beary” – possibly a hat-tip to Gir in his green dog disguise from – who finds themselves on a spaceship with a talkative fox in a suit named Paul Stapleton. He leads a quick tutorial and grants a firearm, some currency, and a few short waves of simplistic enemies before the adventure properly kicks off.

There are familiar twin-stick components here, like a dodge, reload, and 360-degree aiming, but the timing, hit detection, and movement feel stiff and inexact. Small adjustments are especially muddled, implying some issue with the code that keeps returning the player sprite to a fixed coordinate, which makes dodging certain bullet patterns an exercise in frustration. The character “hurtbox” also feels accidentally massive.

’ dodge function has admittedly improved over recent updates, but it’s still too stiff and lengthy, an invincible dash with a too-long delay at its tail. It’s the best tool for barreling right through the many bullets which manifest in the third biome and beyond, but the lack of available finetuning and the general unresponsiveness of the maneuver is a complete