Star of Providence

Monolith is a roguelite that combined the genre's usual mechanics with a bullet hell mechanics. Playing as a space ship you go from small room to small room and blast away the enemies within. You have a dedicated dodge button, but it isnt really required for the vast majority of the game.

The game has a great game feel. Its satisfying to blast enemies, the amount of different power ups available gives it a lot of replayability, and it does a great job at ramping up the difficulty from the first levels. The game is challenging but it never reaches the level of challenge of a proper bullet hell game, not too much how easier it can get with certain builds. But thats just the nature of the genre.

There arent a lot of wrong things with this one, on top of being very good mechanically it also has a lot of charm with the characters in the game. Only trouble is that it feels to close to Enter the Gungeon, but just with less variety in all fronts. It feels like a nice diversion, but Enter the Gungeon still reigns supreme as far as this genre mix goes.

As a shoot-em-up with roguelite features (perma-death, upgrade/weapon unlocking through subsequent runs, randomized level layouts, etc.,) the game looks, feels, and sounds well-crafted. Team D-13 did their homework when developing Monolith. There are a slew of enemies, coupled with creative boss fights. The presentation for bosses is particularly noteworthy, as some bosses range from destroying a behemoth worm from the inside out, to out-gunning a runaway tank with all the firepower in the world.

Other roguelites, namely The Binding of Isaac and Enter the Gungeon, have various flaws such as pacing or unnecessarily-large item pools. Monolith trims the fat on the roguelite experience. The pacing is just fast enough that you can flow from one room clear to the next. Drops for damage upgrades, health increases, and miscellaneous upgrades are semi-independent, so you don't have to worry about feeling under-powered later in a run. Additionally, there's a neat mechanic where any additional health pick-ups received while at full HP goes towards increasing your max HP.

There are a few caveats, though. The upgrades you can choose from on each floor aren't all equally useful; some are definitely more desirable than others in almost every situation. And while the difficulty curve is pretty smooth, it definitely reaches bullet hell territory by the end of a run. This may be a turn-off for some, especially for those who wish to see the true ending since it requires you to play the game on Hard mode, which features some pretty nasty bullet patterns that will keep you on your toes.