In a futuristic Wild West run by gun-wielding droids, you are brought back from the dead by a mad scientist for one purpose—to rid the land of robots. It’s a simple yet challenging isometric shooter with roguelite elements that boasts a strong core gameplay loop and incredibly satisfying combat, but is it worth your time? Find out in our in-depth review.

The Wild, Futuristic West

After a brief cutscene, Dust & Neon ushers you through a brief tutorial before thrusting you into your first mission. This starts Dust & Neon’s gameplay loop, and it’s quite refined in many aspects. You select a mission, complete it, and head back to the hub to upgrade your character, base, and weapons before heading off on another one. Once you get into the groove of things, you’ll be in and out of the hub in less than a minute, giving you more time to shoot things.

The hub contains what you’d usually expect in a mission-based game like Dust & Neon. It has base upgrades, character upgrades, free weapons as well as purchasable ones, and temporary buffs that you can use in your next couple of missions. Some of these features only become accessible after beating certain bosses throughout the story, which you can only take on after reaching certain Reputation Ranks, which are the game’s version of player levels.

To increase your rank, you’ll need to go on missions, and there are quite a few different mission types in Dust & Neon. These range from simple elimination and sabotage missions to bomb defusal and train heists. While these different mission types do give you something different to do, they all boil down to “shoot enemies, collect loot,” with the actual objective of the mission changing almost nothing when it comes to how you play. 

As for the game’s difficulty, Dust & Neon can prove to be a bit of a challenge for some players, especially during certain points in the story. Some of the bosses feature frustrating mechanics that can be a pain to play around with, and unlocking new areas introduces new enemy types that can take a while to get used to. Mission difficulty also increases the longer you go without dying, with Easy and Medium-level missions only being available after your death. As you lose your weapons and earned currencies upon death, it’s pretty punishing, though this can be alleviated with the help of certain base upgrades.

Arguably one of Dust & Neon’s weakest elements is its story, which is nearly non-existent, but given that roguelites don’t rely on a story as heavily as other genres, one could give it a pass as long as all of its other systems shine through. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case with Dust & Neon, which we’ll talk about later. For now, let’s dive into what makes the game great—its combat.

A Gunslinger’s Paradise

Dust & Neon truly shines in its gunplay, with an approach that gives players the feeling of being in an actual Wild West gunfight. This is thanks to the game’s reloading and cover systems, which both work in tandem to deliver fast-paced and rewarding gameplay.

Reloading in Dust & Neon is simple — you press a button, and you add one bullet to your gun. This means that for guns with larger capacities, you’ll be pressing the reload button quite often after using all your bullets. It’s partnered with an animation that plates on the right side of your screen, showing you exactly how the gun gets reloaded as you press the button. This results in an extremely satisfying reload sequence that’ll make you feel like you’re slotting in the bullets yourself while hiding behind cover.

Speaking of which, Dust & Neon employs a cover system that lets you (and your enemies) hide behind objects amidst gunfire. Your character automatically ducks behind cover when beside it, and holding down the Aim button moves your character above it when you want to shoot. It’s worth noting that some enemies will have ways to deal damage to you despite being in cover, so while it’s effective for playing safely, you may have to resort to more run-and-gun tactics in certain situations.

A Barren Skybox

For how satisfying it is to play Dust & Neon, the game is just about as barren as the Wild West itself. You unlock four different zones as you progress through the story, with each zone having its own theme and unique soundtrack. Apart from that, though, the different maps in each zone can often seem indistinguishable from one another. These maps aren’t randomized, either, so you’ll end up running through some of them more than once, especially if you’re aiming to unlock the Arena missions.

Then there are the guns. Sure, they’re satisfying to shoot and reload, and they’re arguably the best part of Dust & Neon, but you’re only limited to three gun types, with little difference between them apart from the stats. Reload animations do differ depending on the gun you’re using, though once you find a good enough Legendary gun to use all the time, that novelty ends up being underused. Eventually, all the guns end up feeling more or less the same to use, which devolves the loot system into a hunt for guns with the best raw stats.

While games featuring roguelite elements don’t have to rely on a well-written story, Dust & Neon’s gameplay loop never evolves past the first couple of hours, and once you’ve finished the game’s story in its entirety, it offers no post-story content to enjoy. The only things left to work for would be any remaining character and base upgrades, but then again, you’d have to be playing through the same levels for hours and hours until you have enough resources to complete them.

The Verdict

Dust & Neon’s fast-paced combat, satisfying reloads, and streamlined gameplay loop are good enough to get one hooked right away, but the lack of variety in its zones, guns, and secondary systems leaves little incentive for anyone to keep playing past the game’s bare-bones story.

Score: 7/10

Pros: 

• Satisfying combat and reloading
• Intense gunfights, especially when combined with the cover system
• Solid gameplay loop

Cons:

• Difficulty can spike a bit too quickly at certain points
• Lack of gun and map variety
• Missions can feel dull and boring after a while

Dust & Neon review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.