Megabonk is a 3D-like survivor specific A sense of humor that has gained a lot lately. I’ve played about 15 hours writing this, so while this quick look is intended more to share my early impressions at the time rather than being a full, rated review, I’ve already done a lot worth talking about. I still haven’t seen much, but in that time I’ve gotten a little more than half of the achievements and unlocks and I’ve had fun. The addition of an extra axis of movement does a lot to make it stand out, and it’s more than competent at all the usual conventions of the genre.
If you’ve played this type of game before, the basics are pretty much the same. You run and fight endless waves of enemies that become increasingly more complex as time goes by. It’ll start with little goblins, then you’ll get goblins with swords, and eventually you’ll get ready for more threatening things like ogres or giant scorpions. A mini-boss appears every now and then, and these add variety and a nice little raise in challenge.
There are also shrines that allow you to summon powerful elite packs and even more bosses with the promise of greater rewards, and I always appreciate this sort of thing where I don’t go into a menu and raise the difficulty, but I can tweak the difficulty as I go based on the decisions I make on the run. Honestly, I prefer it.
As is common with these types of games, all your weapons do their thing automatically, whether it’s a sword or a rocket launcher. The only controls you worry about are movement-related. I like the variety and bombastic approach of weapons. No two seem too similar and they’re all pretty frigid in different situations. Getting the revolver and bullets and stacking bonuses to the number of bullets I can spawn is great.
But of course the most obvious and I think the coolest difference is that Megabonk is built with completely 3D and 3D movement. You can jump and even get upgrades that give you better jumps or double, triple, quadruple jumps, which is tons of fun. There is an item that makes all your weapons do more damage while you are in the air, which can be quite powerful. One of the characters, Monke, can actually climb walls, which gives him great advantages.
And these exploration and planning routes in steep cliffs, up and down, are a gigantic part of Megabonk, which makes each run feel fascinating and challenging in a way many survivor-style games don’t. Firstly, to complete a level, you need to locate the Boss Gate so that you can summon the final boss before the timer runs out, and you end up being overwhelmed by endless waves of ghosts. So there’s an extra need to get out and comb the map unless you get lucky and respawn from a boss gate, which happens sometimes, and I like that.
Then the second part is that the map is littered with breakable containers, temples, and chests, and your power level will be directly related to how many of them you can hit within the time limit before moving on to the next level. So there’s this crazy but also very tactical loop where you want to go quickly, planning your path back carefully to avoid backtracking and marking as many points of interest as possible. Chests, at least most of them, cost gold to open, and that price goes up every time you open them, so sometimes you have to know when to give them because it’s not worth waiting for a coin farm when you won’t be able to afford to open every chest anyway. The number of considerations I have to weigh in my head to put together a really good run feels satisfying, and as usual I can overcome at least a lot of the fickle forces of randomness by playing astute.
Now I have to talk about the humor because it’s one of the first things I noticed. The entire Megabonk theme seems to be millennial and internet brain nest. And it’s honestly tough to tell whether – on RIST he sounds a little mean or snotty – it should really make you laugh on a surface level. Is it the uncomplicated sense of humor that the developers were going for? Or maybe they’re doing a Tim and Eric Cringe comedy, like true Joke, is this a bit stupid? How many layers of irony are we deep? In the first case it doesn’t work so well. But if it’s the latter, it does.
Yes, in 2025. I’m totally still sending all the latest gigachads to my friends. Do you remember him? There is an item that spawns “Borgars”. Damn, did John Hammond show up to pop the champagne after you kicked him out? (The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m using a reference from a 1993 movie to criticize how elderly this meme is, but it’s a classic, okay?) There’s a surprisingly sheltered workplace “Scorpionussy.” There is an improvement that “claps cheeks”. Virtually everything you choose has some reference to years or decades of meme culture. It never bothered me during gameplay, but there were a few times when I thought my eyes were rolling so tough that I could have severed my optic nerves.
Megabonk currently only has two levels, a spooky forest and a deadlier desert, at least unless there are some mysterious ones I don’t know. But each of them has three different levels of increasing difficulty. The first is just one stage, while each subsequent level adds one additional stage with a fresh boss that allows you to carry over all the improvements from the previous one. I find the lack of a change of scenery a bit disappointing. These two biomes are definitely starting to get repetitive, and I couldn’t find anything like a roadmap that said the developers plan to add more. It’s also not marked as early access. But the three levels definitely provide a good challenge and give me more room to push myself.
The meta-progression isn’t very deep, but it’s meaningful and satisfying. Everything outside of the run costs a separate currency called Silver, which can be redeemed at the treadmills. Getting permission to purchase fresh characters, items, and upgrades requires you to first complete a goal or achievement associated with each of them, which is a bit neat. Then you have simpler buffs to level things up, like getting more breaks or more weapon slots. I appreciate that you have to pay for the ability to turn unlocked items on or off and then you can utilize as many of them as you want, as I really like the optimized loot pool that runs in these types of games.
The characters are mostly uncomplicated in their design, but fun to utilize. I think my favorite is CL4NK, which is a robot cowboy gunslinger that starts with a revolver and has increased critical chance at every level. But you also have a skeleton on a skateboard that does more damage the faster it moves, and the ninja is also great fun because it automatically kills any enemy that misses it with an attack.
As far as survivors go, it’s pretty powerful. Especially with the added consideration of the jump button and the entire vertical axis, and the emphasis on route planning and exploration, I found it had that key ability to force me to start a fresh run as soon as I finished the last one, until suddenly a few hours later. I regularly groan at the uninspired humor of an image board, but I feel like sometimes I can appreciate it in an ironic way, and otherwise I’ll just ignore it. I’d say it’s worth a look if you’ve got an appetite for another one of these that isn’t basically just a survival vampire. I just wish there was a little more variety.
