I Hate Running Backwards

I Hate Running Backwards is a shoot em up roguelike in which enemies comes from the bottom of the screen while you move upwards shooting down at them. As you progress and unlock certain achievements, you gain extra power-ups to help fight off the hordes of familiar characters from the Serious Sam universe. You start out with a primary weapon that works like an automatic, shooting directly in front of you in a line and a secondary weapon that changes depending on which character you are playing (the main character has a shotgun, another has a grenade launcher). All the secondary weapons that I played with felt very clunky and I avoided as much as possible, but since you have to pick up ammo to use your weapons, I would sometimes run out of primary ammo and be forced to use my secondary. You also have a special weapon that you pick up from crates lying on the ground, that can vary from a flamethrower to a drone that helps you attack incoming enemies to a gun that shoots sharks. There are also special pick-ups that can spawn like the Serious Damage pickup that makes everything die in one shot, which sounds great but most everything dies in one shot anyway so it never had a huge impact on the game. The best pick-up that spawns is a shield which covers you with three rotating shields that fall off when they get hit, but it doesn’t take away from your health pool. It is always a lifesaver because your health pool is so low anything that can mitigate damage is extremely useful. The last special pick-up gives you infinite ammo which allows you to unload on enemies for roughly 30 seconds without worrying about how much ammo you are wasting.

Throughout some runs, there were also vehicle segments when you would get into either a Humvee with a backward mounted machine gun or a helicopter. These always seemed very out of place and slowed down the gameplay a lot. The whole game is about having hordes of enemies barreling at you but when you get in the Humvee one single Werebull spawns one after another and runs at your car at about half speed making them extremely easy to dodge. Nothing else can really hurt you during the segment so it felt very out of place and slow.

The first thing you will notice when playing IHRB is that this game is hard. Really hard. It will challenge you to use everything in your arsenal to overcome the vast number of enemies against your tiny health pool. Most characters start out with only two health, and from my experience hearts seem to only spawn when your health is full. So, restarting will be a frequent occurrence. However, it is not unbearably difficult and I would say that the challenge is a big part of what makes IHRB so appealing. Nothing is handed to you and the permadeath nature of roguelikes makes getting to the next level that much more intense.

One of the most interesting mechanics in the game is an ability called the hammer, which is a Crash Bandicoot style spin that destroys things in the environment and can be used against enemies as well. Most shoot ’em ups rely solely on destroying enemies to level up but IHRB gives you a lot of experience for destroying buildings as well. So, the gameplay goes from just dodging and shooting, to strategizing how to effectively get from each side of the screen to destroy the walls that will give you loads of experience and pick-ups as well. The environment is fully destructible so there is never a shortage of walls to tear down.

One main problem I have with IHRB is that most roguelikes thrive on each playthrough being a very different experience each time you play a round. With IHRB the power-ups that come from leveling not only felt underwhelming, but they also didn’t change how you played the game. Some give you extra ammo or the chance to deal critical strikes, but you would hardly notice during the gameplay. The special weapons are about the only thing that changed your style and even then, most are lackluster at best. I found myself opening special crates until I found a weapon that was actually good and then holding onto that until I died. There’s also no way to choose between keeping your current special weapon and picking up the new one in the crate so I found that that encouraged me to not to experiment when I found a special weapon that I liked.

The procedurally generated nature of roguelikes can also be frustrating, especially when you have to pick up ammo. Occasionally I would find myself without ammo, not because of a lack of conservation, but because RNG was not on my side and I wasn’t getting ammo drops. When you run out of ammo you only have an extremely slow pistol shot that is unbearable to use, so it would slow down the gameplay a lot.

Ultimately, I Hate Running Backwards is an interesting take on the classic shoot em up style and at a $15 price point, I would definitely recommend trying it out.