There's been a slew of roguelikes on the PC in recent years. The same goes for twin-stick shooters, and the combination of the two genres has been done enough that the prospect of a new offering isn't met with much enthusiasm or excitement anymore. The appearance of a game like Woodpunk seems rather pedestrian, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The story takes place in an era rarely visited by video games: 13th century Italy. You play the role of a young man who went against his family lineage and became an inventor instead of a theologian. The move paid off, as your inventions were good enough to be noticed by the royal Medici family. However, you're soon forced to work on weapons of destruction for them, and in your initial attempts to fight back, you barely survive with your life. Now resurrected as a wooden cyborg, you make it your mission to stop them before things get worse.

The story is simply there to provide a framework. The opening and the ending cut scenes are about the only times when any of this stuff comes up, and while the loading screens try to inject some plot into the game, they go by so quickly that the only way to read it is if you have the game installed on a really slow hard drive. That means the few attempts at humor are wasted because no one will be able to see many of the jokes, but you won't mind after a while.

As alluded to earlier, the core mechanics are of a roguelike with twin-stick shooter sensibilities. After going through the opening tutorial, you get a map of Italy with five different regions to choose from. Each region has a good number of levels to go through before you fight the boss, and each level is completely randomized in enemy count, layout and objective. You start off each level wielding both a gun and a melee weapon, with the former having unlimited ammo reserves but still requiring constant reloading. Everything in the world is destructible, and enemies tend to drop usable scrap, so your wooden robot pal can craft new weapons for you to use right then and there.

Dying means having to restart that region, but you still get to keep the scrap you amassed. That's useful since that scrap is key to getting upgrades in your lab's tech tree for just about everything. That includes elemental ammo, different gun types, and even the ability for your robot to transform into turrets or build walls to shield yourself from enemy fire. Those upgrades further randomize the weapons you start with and what can be crafted. For example, you may begin the level with a sword and a single-fire laser beam, or you can have a spear at hand along with a shotgun that spits flaming bullets. Scrap is also used to buy new suits, which give you some very interesting and fun abilities. Your default suit only gives you the benefit of a jetpack that lets you scale walls or do a quick dash. Get another suit, and you may gain the ability to deliver stronger melee attacks or hover in the air to torch your immediate surroundings.

With the components to make something compelling, Woodpunk commits the sin of not having anything interesting to do with those components. The enemy variety is decent, but the issue is with missions, which boil down to a few activities. You're either going to protect a building or vehicle for a set amount of time, take down some enemy buildings in the allotted time period, or face multiple waves of enemies before using your escape pod to blast off into another arena to do one of these three activities again. They're serviceable enough, but the game's high difficulty level means that you'll die quite often, and once you cycle through these three activities over and over again, it becomes quite repetitive.

Aside from the main quest, about the only other mode is Survival, which has you holding out for as long as possible before you expire. If you want to prolong the game's life, you can play the story in co-op mode, which lets the second player take control of your robot companion. This sounds neat, but it doesn't play out like you'd expect. On the one hand, the robot is perfect for less experienced players, since they can still fire weak shots but can't get hurt by enemies. When you consider how thick the hordes can get, this is helpful. On the other hand, your poor performance is going to hamper the second player, as any hits you take lower their power bar, thus limiting their ability to use their own powers or build new weapons for you. It's a neat idea, but much like the difficulty level, the implementation won't be to everyone's liking.

The presentation is fine but nothing special. The pixel artwork for the characters and the backgrounds looks wonderful, but the enemy scaling is in an odd spot. It is good enough to see the cartoon expressions on some enemies as they decide to run away from you, but there are times when the enemies are also small enough to blend into the environment at inopportune times, especially when the game decides that the level should have rain in it. Meanwhile, the sound effects and music are fine, but the beats for each track are repeated so often that you'll feel like each song is a loop of the same five seconds.

Woodpunk is mechanically sound in the roguelike and twin-stick shooter elements that it mashes together. Its presentation is fine, and the difficulty is much higher than expected. It doesn't do anything that could be considered unique, and the co-op feels rather imbalanced. While Woodpunk may not be the first game to run to for a roguelike twin-stick shooter fix, it's a safe enough title that you won't feel so bad for giving it a shot.

Score: 7.0/10