Viscera review

A garlic-like without the garlic, Viscera is several steps behind what it could be

Every once in a while, it’s fun to hop into a garlic-like, one of the newest modern game genres. Taking its name after the magnificent weapon in the game that seemingly started it all, Vampire Survivors, the genre works by secretly forcing us to grind and farm, almost mindlessly, while we explore a landscape. There have been many similar games that have popped up in the years since the original launched alongside the Steamdeck, and the best way to describe Animation Logic’s Viscera is that, uh, it is one of them.

Perhaps the best way to describe Viscera is that it tries to do new things while staying firmly in the genre, but it doesn’t succeed in any of them, mostly because it never really leans in, leading to a mundane, repetitive and boring experience. For one, there’s no garlic in this game; Viscera is set in a wasteland future full of aliens and big guns and industrial complexes. The weapons are all similar, the environments are all similar, and the music is all similar. Nothing within this games’s aesthetic side does anything new. In fact it feels like a collection of box-checking assets used for a project labeled “my first garlic-like” with a lot of focus on brown and gray.

There’s no style to call its own, whatsoever. And because the remnants of the monsters remain on the ground it’s difficult to see what’s happening on the screen. Imagine just pools of gray blood and limbs on a grayish floor in a grayish world, and no real delineation between those pools and the mutant coming at us. It’s a bit lifeless.

There are some original-ish things that the developers are trying to do, but it feels like they don’t want to go full in because it may alienate some audience. The twin-stick aspect is neat, harkening to arcade games like SmashTV, and brings a more action-oriented approach — but with the weapons almost all reacting the same way it ends up having us just run around collecting money (the game’s version of experience points). The ability to drop a turret on the ground is welcome, but it disappears quickly once it runs out of ammo. It’s as if there’s a refreshing hint of tower defence that sadly never materializes.

Viscera is an off-brand Vampire Survivors clone that checks all the boxes of a first project in the auto-shooter genre but never does anything worthwhile otherwise. It’s the kind of game that is maybe valuable just enough to pick up on a massive sale or in a bundle, but we’d probably not spend much more than a few minutes on it.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for January 27, 2025. Images and video courtesy Publisher.