In his Vampire Survivors review , Matt Cox described the game as something he could play with "one hand in a packet of crisps". I think about this quite often, actually, as someone whose largely offline friends (or Fortnite/FIFA pals) ask me to recommend them a game that's good or interesting. Show them something popular like Elden Ring and, despite its grandeur, it might prove too much in all facets.
But Vampire Survivors? It's an easy sell: simple, digestible, ridiculous value. All of this is to say, One BTN Bosses is from the same school of the easy sell. You can fight bosses with one hand in a packet of pickled onion Space Raiders, after all.
The joy of One BTN Bosses is its simplicity. The story is good because it's largely non-existent: you're part of some corporate structure that's bad, a cutesy pixelated cat wants you to defeat your managerial overlords. You go about their destruction with one hand in a packet of Dorito's Chilli Heatwave and the other on the left click of your mouse.
For the main campaign, there's a series of progressively difficult scenarios, where boss checkpoints keep you from climbing further. And if you get stuck, there's a series of warp holes that whisk you off to a roguelike mode where you can earn extra Grind Points (more on this later) or just blow off some steam in a different format. The format is, at its most basic level, a circle.
You're a little ship that whizzes around the circle automatically and the boss is at its centre. As you whizz, you automatically fire pellets at the boss until they drop dead and explode. The bosses try to thwart your plans by firing stuff back or generating a series of nasty obstacles to rob you of your three lives.
If they succeed, you'll need to restart the level from scratch. At the beginning of the game you've got one trick, so a click of the mouse will send your ship whizzing from clockwise to anti-clockwise and vice versa. Meanwhile bosses will largely go bullet hell on you, generating plenty of missiles to test your timing.
What's neat is how things ramp up, as bosses develop interesting methods to spoil your fun. Large boxes gradually suffocate your space. Circles appear in a row, exploding in sequence.
Missiles splinter. They'll even tinker with the arenas, too, switching them on the fly from a circle to a square or an arc. Pretty much all of them feel demanding (and definitely frustrating) but rarely, if ever, unfair.
And it's clever what tools the game gives you to overcome the bosses' expanding weaponry. Those arcs? You might find teleporters on either side that let you dodge attacks in an instant, so long as you can perform the mental gymnastics required. And as you earn Grind Points for completing levels, you'll unlock new abilities.
So instead of reversing your movement, a button press might let you dash through obstacles or charge up a superfast mega-whizz, stopping you in your tracks temporarily, but letting you fire off bigger pellets for longer. Some are weird, too, like one where pellets are replaced by a little boomerang you'll need to bash into as it spawns in the arena, causing it to ricochet off your ship and into the boss. I will say that I've not found a combination of movement tool and attacking tool I've particularly taken to besides the default setup.
I think that might be because I've not faced a boss that requires a total mixup, but also because the harder the bosses get, the tougher it is to learn new techniques without getting demolished in all of two seconds. It's easier to master the default combo, if I'm honest. Still, I like how the game's depth lies not only in mastering the tools you've selected, but more so momentum as a whole.
That's because as you change direction, your ship takes time to get up to full speed. And during this ramp up, it'll fire small pellets, then medium pellets, until it fires big pellets at maximum speed. All of them, of course, increasing in their firepower.
This makes for an additional challenge on top of the "god I just want to beat this boss and move on" scenario, as a more serious crowd can race for the fastest times. But for the average person, it's also a neat way to challenge yourself and see just how long you can keep the jet engines burning without crashing. If you're really struggling to win, you can head into a roguelike mode where you'll earn Grind Points for climbing a ladder that only gets tougher.
It's the usual stuff: pick a route, choose from some upgrades, death is permanent. Although it does work really well, to the point where it's interesting powerups and general rhythm appeal to me more than the base campaign itself. Nah, I don't think One BTN Bosses is an absolute belter.
But I do think it's a good time. And perhaps most importantly, it is a game I can recommend to my not-so-gamery friends who are after something 1) a bit different; 2) they can play with one hand in a packet of Walkers Max Punchy Paprika; 3) is not called " Elden Ring " or " Dragon's Dogma 2 ", which immediately makes it less like I'm speaking in some nerd tongue..
