The Bullet-heaven genre of games that started with the Vampire Survivors craze is still going strong after two years. More and more games are either trying to evolve the genre, or just make it their own. Striving for Light: Survival takes more from the second most successful game in the genre - Brotato, but still changes enough to make it interesting and it really knows how to keep a player engaged, even if that player is stuck on a particular level.

Striving for Light was originally a rogue-lite action RPG that came out back in 2021 but didn't really get going and the reviews were mixed on Steam so the developers decided to take the world and characters they built and cash in on the bullet-heaven genre. A lot of developers did the same thing and failed, but the people at Igniting Spark Games succeeded and made something that truly has that "one more run" feel to it. The runs are short - clocking in at about 15 minutes per map if you manage to get to wave 20. 

The typical run will look like this. You choose a character from eight available ones, six of them you have to unlock with certain achievements, then you choose a melee and a ranged weapon, and there's a lot of them to choose from - over 30 and they are fairly simple to unlock. And then you choose the skills you want - maximum of twelve which will appear on the skill tree while playing so you can push your build to go in either direction you want. Then you can choose which map you want to play, at the start you only have one and each time you beat a map you unlock a new one, and now for the amazing content part, there are sixteen maps and each map has five different difficulties which add traps, more enemies, more bosses etc. which means you will constantly be playing something different and very rarely you will have to grind the same map to unlock something.

By far, the best feature of the game is the skill tree. While you're playing, every time you finish a map you get a certain amount of skill points which are obtained by collecting experience when you defeat enemies. You then use those skill points in the skill tree that is ever expanding and interconnected so you can truly build the way you want to. Want to be tanky and not really think about dodging? Keep investing into health, want to attack so fast you can just stand in one place and kill everything around you? Get attack speed, the limits are as close to endless as you can get. You can focus more on melee damage and get explosive hits, poison hits, multi hits, just plain more melee damage, or you can focus on ranged damage and get more projectiles, make projectiles come back to you, increase their range, speed, damage etc. It really reminded me of some ARPG games like Path of Exile, Last Epoch etc. where you're investing in some small stat boosts and immediately see the difference and feel more powerful.

The features that I didn't really enjoy that much were the music and some enemy encounters. The music is simple and kind of repetitive. On the Steam page it says that there is over 77 minutes of playtime of the soundtrack, but honestly most of it felt the same and just ... meh. Some enemy encounters are also way more imaginitive then others. For example, the last boss of the first map is really well done, with multiple different attacks and you actually have to watch where you're standing and learn his attack patterns. He's not the hardest boss ever but it's a nice way to show players how bosses are gonna be in this game. Then the second last boss appears and it's a spider with slow shooting poison projectiles that you can probably avoid with your eyes closed. 

Overall, if you're looking for another bullet-heaven game, I recommend this one, you won't spend too many hours on it but you'll have fun over the whole journey. 

8/10