It’s sometimes odd how small things can help to set a game apart from the rest, on occasion including a visual gimmick or two that can simply make the experience more memorable. I suppose that may have been some of the motivation behind Dungeons of Paint, making a very confined twin-stick shooter where the arena will slowly get splattered with layers of differently-colored paint, but unfortunately along the way they really lost sight of making the game engaging and fun in the first place.

On a base level, this is a generic twin-stick shooter that doesn’t quite feel like it’s of the classic arcade variety, but I’m not sure what else I would classify it as. Rather than being inundated with enemy mobs to try to amp up the excitement you’ll be facing as many as a handful of them at a time at most. While you won’t know what type of weapons they may have when you face them, or perhaps even what sort you’re using at the time, I suppose the unpredictable firefights are meant to suck you in.

Perhaps for a genre novice this could be tough or more interesting, but for me it quickly became tiresome. The guns you can use range from merely middling to lame, none really having the personality to be notable even if they are varied. The challenge is that every time you pick up an ammo pack to keep yourself from running dry, you’ll find that you’ve got a new gun as well. Where perhaps the developer saw this as adding a layer of exciting unpredictability, it just made me lose interest even more quickly. With no real strategy, time constantly being wasted trying to find enemies using the not-very-reliable direction indicator, and play that borders on being one-dimensional, there’s simply no reason to have to settle for this, even if it were on sale.