What in the heck is a reverse bullet hell? If a bullet hell is “so many bullets” then I have to image it’s like… Not many bullets at all. That sounds too easy.
Normal bullet hell (Touhou): the enemies shoot a hell of bullets at you. And your job is to avoid it.
Reverse bullet hell (Vampire Survivors): you shoot a hell of bullets at the enemies. And your job is to shoot even more, bigger, stronger bullets.
I don’t know why people keep calling it rogue like. Rogue-likes have a lot more randomness than an easily manipulated item drop system. I don’t know that a random map is a necessity but it certainly needs something along those lines.
Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.
Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).
Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean “start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random”
So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right…).
But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.
Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.
Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that’s more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can’t progress, so I don’t think it quite works.
Oh that makes sense. I also now just realized all the RoR2 maps are pre made, you just randomize the order you see them in, and the enemies that spawn there (within a fixed set)
For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.
It’s a really stupid way to differentiate the two as well. Rogue like is the original term and will obviously be the blanket term, but people want to insist that a subset of such games are not actually a subset (“it’s not a rogue like, it’s a rogue lite”) because of the addition of a feature. When in reality most people view all rogue lites as rogue likes.
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Walking Death Simulator
Survive-em-up?
Seriously I fucking loved the name.
This one makes so much sense I’m surprised it’s the first time I hear it.
passive swarm shooter
Survive Em Up
I like my shootemup games personally
I thought it was already considered a reverse bullet-hell. But I do like Bullet heaven as well.
I’ve heard from at least one smaller channels that it’s a bullet heaven. That’s at least what they call this style of game.
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I’ve always heard Arena Survival
Garliclike
lol saw this on a Steam Review and it is my favorite.
I thought it was a survivor-like?
Swarm shooter, reverse bullet hell, or enemy hell
Yea it’s always been reverse bullet hell.
Which is why it’s always been bullet heaven
Robotron 2084 clones?
Haha, it is very similar, but I think robotron is a twin-stick shooter since you control movement and the shooting.
Its one of my favorite games though, my grandfather had the actual arcade cabinet.
Bullet Heaven
Bullet Heaven is an old bullet-hell game playable here. Naming the genre that is stupid.
Wait, It’s a new grounds game? So not even something that’s been published?
“Somebody somewhere used that name for their hobby project 13 years ago so now it can’t ever be used for anything else”
No two things can ever share a name
Projectile Nirvana
Yup, this is the one.
This is the one I always hear these days.
I heard it from the Castle Superbeast podcast.
The genre is ASS games. Can’t go wrong with that.
Pew Pew Woosh.
Epilepsy-vania
GPU Fryer.
S3: Survive and Shoot the Swarm.
They’re already called reverse bullet hell?
What in the heck is a reverse bullet hell? If a bullet hell is “so many bullets” then I have to image it’s like… Not many bullets at all. That sounds too easy.
It should be more in inverse bullet hell: it’s hell, but not for you.
Just like Vampire Survivors!
I didn’t come up with the name, that’s just what people have been calling it for as long as I can remember.
Normal bullet hell (Touhou): the enemies shoot a hell of bullets at you. And your job is to avoid it. Reverse bullet hell (Vampire Survivors): you shoot a hell of bullets at the enemies. And your job is to shoot even more, bigger, stronger bullets.
I didn’t know that, but it fits. That or bullet heaven.
Bullet Heaven is the name of an existing game, don’t clobber it with a genre name.
An existing game from newgrounds posted 14 years ago. I don’t think it’s going to cause that much confusion.
Looks like it’s too late. I Googled bullet heaven and it took a few minutes to find the actual game, which is ironically a bullet hell game.
It’s an autoshooter isn’t it?
Vampire Survivors would be a rogue-like autoshooter.
Like Backpack Battles is an autobattler.
Edit:
As raised in the comments, actually a rogue-lite as VS has meta-progression.
I’ve also heard Autoshooter. Seems as good of a genre name as any.
Yep definitely is. I guess OP hasn’t heard of brotato and deep rock survivor either.
I don’t know why people keep calling it rogue like. Rogue-likes have a lot more randomness than an easily manipulated item drop system. I don’t know that a random map is a necessity but it certainly needs something along those lines.
They call it a rogue-like because there is meta-progression even though you “start over” each run.
Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.
Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).
Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean “start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random”
So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right…).
But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.
Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.
Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that’s more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can’t progress, so I don’t think it quite works.
Just an addendum:
Risk of Rain does not have randomly generated maps. The maps are from a predetermined set, I believe 6 for each biome.
Oh that makes sense. I also now just realized all the RoR2 maps are pre made, you just randomize the order you see them in, and the enemies that spawn there (within a fixed set)
For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.
I still use it but there are maybe 2 true rouge-likes published a year and no one plays them so it really doesn’t matter.
It’s a really stupid way to differentiate the two as well. Rogue like is the original term and will obviously be the blanket term, but people want to insist that a subset of such games are not actually a subset (“it’s not a rogue like, it’s a rogue lite”) because of the addition of a feature. When in reality most people view all rogue lites as rogue likes.