TL;DR - Dust & Neon is an adequate rogue-lite twin-stick shooter with exceptional combat, but whose mechanics don’t go far enough to make it stand out.

Dust & Neon is a fun twin-stick shooter where you play as a robot cowboy shooting his way through futuristic wild west towns and menacing robotic enemies. The game feels awesome to play, and I particularly like its clever cover mechanic, but it doesn’t push itself or the genre into any new ground, and some of its progression feels a little unbalanced.

Let’s begin by getting the fluff out of the way. The robotic/western/sci-fi setting is fun to run around in and fits the silly attitude the game is going for. I love the cel-shaded art style; the bright colors really pop and help make everything readable on screen. It’s easy to locate enemies, loot, and interactable objects and I never felt lost or frustrated because the visuals got in the way. Story wise there’s not much here. There are only a couple dozen lines of dialogue and they mostly serve to get the player into the action as quickly as possible and, frankly, I think that’s all it really needed to do. The sound design is immersive and satisfying - the guns in particular sound distinct and recognizable from each other. I found the soundtrack to be enjoyable but it started to become boring and repetitive over my playtime. Overall I would say these aspects didn’t really sway my opinion of the game too heavily in one direction or the other.

The game is structured much like any other rogue-lite. You’ll select a mission, go out and shoot baddies, accomplish the task, and return to your base where you can spend your accumulated currency on new weapons and upgrades. If you die, you lose your weapons and money and have to start from scratch. The map is divided up into four zones which unlock as you defeat the boss of each zone. As you successfully complete missions, your Rank will increase, giving you skill points to invest into perks like increased health, faster cooldowns, higher ammo reserves, etc. Once you achieve the required Rank, you’ll take on a boss. As you open up more zones, the types of available missions increase. I think this is one of the weak points of the game. While each zone looks distinct from the others and you’ll find yourself exploring western shanty-towns, ducking and moving between train cars, and delving into underground caverns, the procedurally generated areas within each zone ended up blurring together and feeling rather monotonous to me. The mission structures also feel a bit uninspired. Apart from one mission type that requires you to hold a position for a set time limit, the rest of the levels ultimately boil down to going to a specified area and shooting the extra tough bad guy, or shooting a large group of bad guys, or shooting the bad guys protecting the thing you’re also supposed to shoot. The good news is…the shooting is superb!

The gameplay is where Dust & Neon really shines and elevates the experience. You’re provided with three weapons: a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle. You can find better variations of these weapons while looting on missions, or purchase some at your base. All of the weapons are effective and fun to play with. Shooting feels punchy and the camera shakes to accentuate the impact when your bullets connect with their target. The reload mechanic requires you to press the reload button for each individual bullet, which I thought was a fun twist on a mechanic that is never even thought about in most and games, and led to some fun risk-reward weighing in moment-to moment combat. The reload animations are also quite pretty look at. The movement is nice and smooth, dodging gives you sufficient i-frames (I particularly like the dodge-slide your cowboy does when trying to move into cover), and the game cleverly implements a fun contextual cover system to great effect. Your character automatically ducks down as you approach large crates, barrels, or counters to protect you from oncoming fire. Pulling the left trigger allows you to stand up and aim, but leaves you vulnerable to enemy fire. Aiming in this game simply means being able to see the line of fire and effective distance of your currently equipped weapon so you can be sure you are pointing in the right direction. You aren’t required to aim though, which means that a skilled player can blind fire a whole saloon of robots away without the risk of exposing themselves or taking any damage. This leads to some really fun old west style shootouts as the enemy AI swarms around you, moving to find its own cover, and attempts flanking maneuvers. The enemy AI is good and my most fun moments in the game were when I was frantically sliding in and out of cover while desperately reloading and dealing out as many shots as I could. As soon as shots are fired you’ll have a wave of enemies gunning for you from all angles, and if the enemies inside buildings hear the fighting outside they’ll begin to spill out into the battle. There were times when my whole screen was filled with evil robots trying to end me as I slid, ran, shot, and changed weapons on the fly to deal with new enemies pouring in from off-screen. This all helped to keep combat engaging through my 8.5 hours of playtime. I felt like such a badass as I waltzed into an old jail, shotgun in tow, to wreak havoc on the robot enemies inside.

That all being said, I encountered some balance problems in my playthrough that put a damper on the otherwise rewarding loot system. I’ll give two examples. First, I came across a pistol, shotgun, and rifle at Rank 20 that were so powerful that I was able to beat two bosses with them and also discarded every other weapon I found for several hours of gameplay. It’s nice to feel overpowered for a little while, but it was disappointing to not find any new weapons that would be as effective as what I already had, especially after beating a boss and hoping for a shiny new gun. Second, there’s a gauntlet style mission where you go through three combat arenas and, if you successfully beat each arena, are rewarded with some nice new weapons. In order to unlock the gauntlet mission, you are required to complete a checklist of 4 or 5 regular missions beforehand. On 3 different attempts, after dying and losing my gear, I made it my goal to do a gauntlet to secure some good gear. Each time, while completing the checklist missions, I was able to acquire good enough weapons that when I finished the gauntlet, the rewards were weaker than guns I just obtained in the regular missions. This cheapened the purpose of doing the gauntlet for me and left me feeling discouraged. What is the point of going out of your way to do something challenging for the promise of a great reward when you can more reliably get better equipment at a lower risk?

There are other things that don’t feel fully fleshed out. There are two separate shops that sell character buffs for a limited number of missions, which feels redundant. I had a few instances of my character getting stuck in some awkward geometry and dying because I couldn’t escape. I found it strange that boss fights were gated behind achieving a certain Rank, which left me doing more of the repetitive missions to level up and just felt like filler. I would have liked to see some greater depth in the combat as well. There are exploding red barrels that are begging to be thrown or pushed into enemies but can do nothing else but sit still and get shot at. Instead of another limited buff it would have been cool to substitute it for a special move or power. I think that with just a little more oomph, the already excellent combat would have been pushed to the next level.

Overall I enjoyed my time with Dust & Neon. The combat and gameplay define the experience and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I had a blast collecting weapons and blowing robots up, but a strange progression system and some uninspired design elements left me wanting a little more depth. If you like twin-stick shooters, or are an obsessive rogue-lite fan who likes playing as many as they can find, this game is definitely worth your consideration. If you’re new to either, this is an accessible and easy way to get into either genre, but there are better experiences out there that you should try first. I would probably avoid purchasing it at its full price of $20 and wait for a sale.

I’ve played this on an iPad Pro 2020 thanks to Netflix sub. The reason why I’m giving this game 1 star is due to the crashes in relation to the game’s cruel ‘roguelike’ element. Normally you lose all your weapons when you leave a mission or die. In the case of dying, you definitely lose all your weapons and what you got during your mission but you get to keep your experience and you can re-buy your weapons if you’ve upgraded your base enough and have the cash. When the game crashes though, you lose everything I mentioned and you can’t re-buy your weapons. You then have to pray that RNG is on your side to give you good weapon drops during missions or weapon selection in store and have enough money to buy them. It’s very expensive to buy weapons that are as powerful as what you had earlier. You’re therefore forced to grind to get enough money. You already need to grind to increase your rank for the bosses, why do this?! Who decided the brilliant idea of losing weapons if you exit a bloody mission?! I understand not keeping things you found during a mission but make you lose the weapons you had before a mission?! The game crashed at least 5 times this way. The last 3 times were one after another. The game has other bugs where when some enemies are near a wall you don’t hit them the first time at least, and there are other minor things. I usually play games way past their prime after they’ve had multiple patches. I’m now reminded why. I’ve made it to the last region, rank 26. I’m 1 rank to fighting the 5th boss (out of 6). I won’t be playing the game if it doesn’t have a fix for this mess. I’m not sure if the PC version is better in this regard but you have been warned.