Nightmare Reaper review for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

It’s not often that a game’s composer tells you most of what you need to know about a game, but in the case of Nightmare Reaper, it does. See, the music here was created by Andrew Hulshult, who has previously worked on games like Doom Eternal, Quake Champions, Dusk, and Prodeus. If you’re looking for a list of games to which Nightmare Reaper could be compared, that’s a pretty good place to start.

Mind you, just because Nightmare Reaper is similar to those games, it doesn’t mean it’s exactly the same. For starters, its aesthetic is much more early ‘90s. In fact, it’s so retro-looking that it could easily be mistaken for a game that came out thirty years ago. It has the same look and feel as early 3D shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, right down to the flat look of everything in the distance.

Thankfully, just because it looks old, it doesn’t play that way. Character movement – both yours and that of your many enemies – is fast and fluid, and you constantly need to be on your toes for enemies attacking you at fast speeds out of nowhere. You’re well-armed, so you’re never lacking firepower to take on the monsters and demons that inhabit this world, but you’re going to die quite a bit.

The other major difference between Nightmare Reaper and its influences is that this game is a procedurally generated roguelike. That means no two levels are the same, and you never know quite what you’ll encounter when you enter a level or a room. Given the difficulty, that makes it more of a challenge, since you can’t try to memorize where the enemies are, but if you like running into rooms guns blazing with little change of survival, this delivers on that.

In other words, even with those minor differences, Nightmare Reaper fits squarely into the box you’ll want to slot it into at first glance. It may have a few minor differences, but if it’s blasting demons you’re after, you’ll get exactly that here.

Feardemic provided us with a Nightmare Reaper Nintendo Switch code for review purposes.