Check out this horde survival roguelike where you and your friends are a frog riding on a mech's shoulders

Back in 2022 the developers of an indie roguelike announced their game Shoulders of Giants by boldly asking this question: "What if a frog piloted a mech?"

They have seemingly found the answer, which is that it would be rad, because now they're releasing two games about a frog on a mech this year, recently dropping a demo for Entropy Survivors, a bullet hellish roguelike where you've got two movesets to switch between: that of gunslinging frog, and that of sword-wielding mech.

That's pretty much the whole concept, playing out akin to a twin-stick shooter with multiple character classes and weapons to collect. Some of the weapons are real goofy, though: The power to summon a bunch of trampling garbage trucks, or a gun that shoots bees.

Spending some time with the demo it got off to a slow start, but once I started to understand the dodge-fire-dodge-attack herding of the enemy horde I understood a lot about how to play. The demo has three levels of increasing difficulty and a bunch of cool class perks to unlock. I think it's worth a look if the twin-stick shooting or arcade-style horde survival genres are interesting to you.

Entropy Survivors is also an online co-op game, which I actually think will suit it well. The plan is clearly that should be doing that more often than not, and the pacing will fit playing with a friend better as you'll be able to cover each other while reloading to survive longer.

You can find Entropy Survivors on Steam, where it has a free demo. It's developed by Moving Pieces Interactive and plans to release in the second quarter of 2024. Moving Pieces' other game, Shoulders of Giants, still also plans to release this year.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.