MEGABONK is a Wonderful Escape from Reality | Review

Gamble Your Time for Dopamine? Worth it.

Time slips away effortlessly while playing. Incredibly addicting trying to get that perfect run, chasing a lucky attempt. Would you like to gamble your time for dopamine? I think it’s worth it.

Megabonk is one of those games that introduces a wonderful brain worm to your mind that continually whispers in your dopamine receptors the small, yet convincing phrase... “just one more round”. It may not compel you at first, but with a little time, you’ll find yourself happily donating many hours of your time, again, and again. So how does Megabonk do it?

The game is simple: Survive, against waves and waves of monsters. If you cannot, then “maybe him skill issue?” You’ll increase the odds of your survival by obtaining weapons, tomes, items, and stat boosts, all of which is influenced by the luck of the draw.

When you’re more or less, let’s face it, gambling on random chance with almost every action you make in Megabonk, you can begin to understand how exciting it is thinking about the prospects of doing better, chasing THE attempt, where the stars align, and the game can NEVER kill you. Imagine if you get some legendary items within the first few minutes. Maybe the pillars give you several heaps of boosts in a particular stat. Maybe you get the right combination of weapons and tomes you’re looking for, in the order you want them. What if the randomly generated placement of objects in the map is perfect... But if things don’t start out in your favor... then well... there’s always the next game, right?

Now, getting the perfect combination of things isn’t your only objective in Megabonk. Perhaps along the way you’ll complete little quests like “kill 15000 enemies as such and such character”, or “beat stage one without moving” or something like that. These quests and challenges are certainly fun ways to test what you know about the games systems, and show how well you can “perform” under pressure. Completion of these, and your attempts to survive in general, give a currency which can be spent which unlock access to new characters, weapons, tomes, and items.

Ironically, unlocking more stuff makes it somewhat more difficult to plan out how you’re going to survive in any given attempt by inflating the pool of possibilities and decreasing the odds of obtaining any one thing. BUT, this can be somewhat mitigated by allowing you to toggle unlocked stuff “on and off” to remove it from the pool entirely. Also, during a run, you can also banish, skip, or refresh your possibilities in many of the menus. Overall though, the things you do unlock along the way are very fun and very worth going for.

By making you unlock items, the game achieves a very balanced pace where you learn about weapons, tomes, and items at a rate slow enough to allow you to think about possible synergies as you “unlock” these new possibilities. For example, early on, you might unlock the thorns’ tome, and the life steal tome, then think to yourself... wait, if I can damage enemies by being hurt, can I life steal off of the thorns damage? Does that make me invincible? And... no, it totally doesn’t. BUT, it did teach me about the value of the life steal tome. Which was very helpful until I was punched REALLY HARD.

Discovering basic synergies is certainly one of the better joys in the game. Of course, you are always seeking the super-rare-legendary-tier high of becoming an unkillable god being in any particular survival attempt. But the small victories are what keeps you hooked, and engaged. What happens when you complete a particular quest and unlock this weird item? How will this new character change your strategy? Is your lucky socks making a difference today? Stuff like that.

You can completely ruin this part of the game if you look up guides or YouTube videos on the “meta” of items and stuff. I’d highly recommend you not rob yourself of the discovery experience.

But let’s chat about the end game experience for a second. Because holy crap. Some of the unlock conditions for a few items in this game are downright evil. Handfuls of hours of my life have been spent trying to unlock some of these things. There’s a point in a few of them where I’d just lost hope. That was a good time to pull up the guides on Steam. To a degree, some of them are just inklings of ideas of what COULD work, and has worked for some players. For completionists sakes, those have been SUPER helpful, and I do recommend reading those when you get stumped on how to complete some of these challenges.

Basically everything in Megabonk has some kind of joke attached to it. It’s incredibly unserious. I find that, pretty funny and charming honestly, but I’ve read a few reviews where people “wish it didn’t have that.” Buddy, I mean, what did you expect from the game called “Megabonk”, that is more or less gameplay wise, a 3-dimensional “survivor” type game?

Going a bit further into that, the extra jumps from this added dimension might initially feel like, kind of a stupid thing to upgrade initially. But the skilled player understands extra jumps allow you to dodge enemies and boss attacks if you’re paying attention and being smart with your movement. This can even make or break some survival attempts. That’s the primary thing you’re getting from this extra dimension. A little extra something you can do with your free will.

So. You move your little guy. Make some choices. The outcome at the end, win or lose, it’s affected by a collection of what you know and understand about the systems of upgrades, synergies, and items, combined with your experience of what’s seemingly worked for you in the past. Even so, the choices you can make, are always influenced by random chance across the board. The outcome of almost every game you play will still likely be determined because of your luck with the string of random chance events in any given play session.

So the question I’ve thought of is why play games like this?, If me winning Megabonk (or survivor games like it) is largely determined by random chance, why should I even start to gamble my time at all?

The answer is perhaps as simple as Megabonk. The Game is Fun. If I am having fun playing a game that is partially determined by random chance... well, that’s all that should matter in this crazy world. Being able to enjoy a moment in life because of Megabonk’s funny dumb jokes, and mega-fun albeit, very rare instances of successfully wielding godlike power due to some ones and zeros turning on in a very specific way in my computer... mmm. Chasing that feeling makes life just that much more worth living for. Ya know? I’m happy with that.

Performance has been excellent. My favorite way to play has been on the Steam Deck, so you know that it isn’t that demanding of a game. The developer famously has categorized the PC requirements as potato, so I don’t think you’ll have any issues if you have A computer. I’ve even had success running the thing on my phone (whole other can of worms, FEX stuff).

The music slaps, dudes. It is legitimately a part of this game that keeps me enjoying it. I buy the soundtracks for games that have them in Steam when I make videos and I could not be happier to support that specifically and listen to it. The MegaChad theme in particular, is my JAM.

ULTIMATELY, it’s incredibly addicting trying to get that perfect run, chasing a lucky attempt. It’s a blast trying to complete challenges or knock out, unlocking items. Time slips away effortlessly, sometimes even for hours when you’re playing. Are you looking for that kind of escape? Would you like to gamble your time for dopamine? Got a spare 7-10$USD? Then MEGABONK is for you.

Buy the game on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3405340/Megabonk/