If you spent your childhood Friday nights blasting demons in Doom or Quake, you need to look at this demo. RIPCORE takes classic 90s boomer shooter chaos and mixes it into an intense modern roguelike loop, and here is the most honest review stat I can offer: the demo takes less than an hour to finish, and I have already put three hours into it. Even after I was done recording, I kept coming back for another run. Verdict: play it.
Kill, evolve, repeat
You run around the map shooting demons, gathering experience and souls, then trade those souls for active and passive upgrades. Familiar roguelike territory - the closest comparison is Risk of Rain 2, just much more intense. And as you get stronger, the enemies scale right along with you: more monsters, more health, more damage, the same escalating spiral you know from Vampire Survivors.
The question with a loop like this is always the same. Does it get stale, or can you spend a few hundred hours sending demons back to hell?
Eventually it will get stale. But not for a good while. Six unlockable characters give the runs real variety on their own, and the item pool creates serious potential for build specialization. There is one thing that concerns me, though: I always ended up relying on the main gun for damage. Some items add extra damage sources, and they all feel underwhelming - right now the best play is stacking main weapon damage and defenses and ignoring the rest. Maybe it is a demo issue, maybe a balance pass is coming, but the game needs mechanics that reward utility builds and stupid experiments. That is where the fun challenge runs live.
RIPCORE screenshots
Metal does the heavy lifting
Visually, RIPCORE does not impress. It is simple and clear, and it works well enough - but let’s be honest, nobody plays boomer shooters for the graphics. The bigger irritation is that enemy projectiles are hard to notice. Not hard to dodge, hard to see, especially with hundreds of monsters chasing you across the screen.
The soundtrack, though. RIPCORE takes its cue from Doom 2016: blasting demons to a mean heavy metal soundtrack, and it absolutely works. More than once I came back just to play a run with those tunes.
Performance held up flawlessly - hundreds of enemies, zero FPS drops. Bugs exist, and at least one is funny: click the left mouse button during a tutorial text screen and your gun starts firing continuously after the box closes. Made me chuckle, then made me wonder what else is hiding in there.
For the Friday night demon slayers
RIPCORE has an amazing concept implemented the right way. Whether it becomes something big rests on the replay mechanics: can you make absolutely overpowered builds? Stupid builds? Will profile progression improve the baseline characters? Those answers come with the full release later this year.
For anyone who grew up in Doom and Quake, this will reignite that feeling. Intense gunplay and roguelike progression powered by heavy metal is a recipe for a great game. The demo is free on Steam - go try it.
