Centipede Gun – PS5 Review

Centipede Gun is an autobattling rogue-like from Brazil-based solo developer Mateusk2m.  It is, of course, another in a long list of entries into the post-Vampire Survivors genre, and it makes its way to PSN a couple of years after its initial Steam release.

The game sees you playing as the titular centipede, or at least one small part of it, which you control with a fairly unusual setup. The left stick advances the centipede forwards (up on the left stick) and backwards (down). You steer with the right stick, left for anti-clockwise, right for clockwise. It’s a bit like operating a remote-control car.

It’s a slightly awkward control method for sure, but you do get used to it after some time. We’re not sure it’s the most optimal way of doing things, but it is different, and the quirkiness of it helps the game feel a little different to what is a glut of autobattlers on PSN.

Enemies warp into the single-screen arena and will either travel towards you in an effort to cause some contact damage or they’ll stay stationary but will fire bullets, sometimes in random directions, other times at you or, more annoyingly, where you’re going to be.

As per the conventions of the genre, some of them will drop orbs and these work as currency, allowing you to buy upgrades in the screen that pops up between levels. Here you can buy modules to attach to the centipede, and, as is often the case with autobattlers and rogue-likes, this is the most interesting part of the game.

You can buy guns (good) and melee weapons (don’t bother), weapon modules that augment a weapon’s effectiveness with faster firing, larger bullets, chain damage and other modifiers or skill upgrades such as healing, shields and economy perks.

What’s good is that you can start creating decent synergies depending on how you place each module. A damage modifier placed between two weapons can improve both of them; a shield placed next to a bullet-blocker can shore up your defence in one direction, affecting how you choose to steer the entire centipede. Also, you can keep stacking modules of one type into one space, upgrading it along the way,

We didn’t feel like there were endless combinations to explore. Often, it felt like the best builds were pretty obvious, and besides, you don’t have a lot of spare money in the early stages, so you just end up buying what you’re offered.

It is engaging, though. Once you get used to the controls and the slightly basic, but oddly unoptimised, upgrade interface, the game comes together. It’s quite a short game, only really incentivising you to beat it four times (one normal run and increasingly harder ‘NG+’ modes) but we found the increasing challenge was pitched just right and to get the final trophy (NG+3 with an item that makes it so that any module that is destroyed is lost forever) took a good degree of build optimisation and a bit of practice.

Sure, there are some improvements we could suggest. The graphics are basic in that Nidhogg way, chunky pixels and single-coloured sprites and the upgrade screen could give you a bit more information, such as telling you what level a module is up to or how much damage your guns are doing (we could never figure out if it was worth upgrading one gun as far as possible or having two).

But now that we’ve maxed out the trophy set, which just took a couple of sessions with Centipede Gun, we have to say it’s a fun little game. At £3.99, it’s almost double the PC price, but you’ll at least get 3.99 hours of fun out of it, and even though it’ll be forgotten quickly, for a while there, it wasn’t bad at all.