Everything you need to know about the new bullet hell game All Bosses It's right there in the title. You press a single button and you're fighting a series of bosses. It's a simple premise and more so from developer Midnight Munchies. You might think that with just one button, the game would quickly become boring or lack depth—but it's quite the opposite. All Bosses It is an immersive game where new challenges are constantly added to master.
I've already explained the premise, and it doesn't really go any further than that. Each level puts you in control of a moving object stuck on a track. The single button you use changes the direction of your movement along the track (which can be a circle, a square, a straight line, and more) to get out of the way of oncoming enemy attacks. You also have the ability to attack, but while your singular input is already taken up by directional control, All Bosses ties attacks to movement speed. The faster you move, the more bullets you fire back at your opponent; changing direction lowers your speed, at which point it must be rebuilt. This creates a balancing act in this deceptively simple gameplay. You need to avoid hazards, but you also want to take out enemies quickly, which means you need to strategically choose exactly when to change direction in order to maintain your top speed for as long as possible.
Staying true to its name, All Bosses never gives you more than a single input, but each level changes things up thanks to differences in enemy attack patterns. In the beginning, you'll encounter enemies who just shoot bullets at you, but over time they'll start throwing bombs with wide areas of effect, missiles that home in on you, and special projectiles that ricochet around a track, to name just a few of the tactics you'll encounter. It turns what could have been a repetitive gameplay loop into a frantic fight for your life. Soon after you start the game, you're faced with situations where the screen is almost entirely filled with attacks that you have to dodge with a single button. But to give you a fighting chance, All Bosses offers alternatives to your basic directional change operation.
As you complete levels, you collect GP (Grind Points) to slowly unlock different abilities that change what your button presses do. An early skill you acquire can replace your basic directional movement with a dash, which lets you accelerate into attacks without having to turn to avoid them. But new abilities don’t just change how you move; they can also change how you attack, by replacing your bullets with a laser or allowing you to knock back enemy attacks. Midnight Munchies claims there are over 100 ability combinations to try out. However, the game’s levels feel tailored to the basic setup you have at the start. I spent a lot of time trying out the other abilities and really liked how the dash felt in certain levels, but I found myself frequently reverting to the default abilities as they felt best suited to each difficulty.
All Bosses has a short, four-hour campaign that's mostly an extended tutorial that gets you into the game's mind world. There's a cute – if basic and trivial – plot about climbing the ruthless corporate ladder, but gameplay is king here. So All Bosses' roguelike mode might be the best part about it. Once you've unlocked the first fifteen minutes or so, you can dive into roguelike levels whenever you want. As per genre conventions, you'll progress through a series of levels, and after each boss you'll unlock random skills to use in the next level. While the skills don't always seem very useful in the campaign, the roguelike mode makes it fun to use and master each new skill. All Bosses is all about momentum, and the roguelike mode distills that perfectly, yet even as you progress through the campaign, the game's tight level design never ceases to amaze.
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