"Feels A Tad Too Early"

Summary Rightfully, Beary Arms has gameplay issues and bugs despite drawing inspiration from popular genre hits.

The dodge function is stiff and needs improvement for better gameplay experience.

Skill trees lack excitement, most weapons are pun-based, and the levels lack narrative connection and variety.

New twinstick-shooter action-roguelite Rightfully, Beary Arms forges ahead in its Early Access lifespan with the recent update "Claws & Paws," but it’s still a hard game to parse at the best of times. From its grating title to its ungainly gameplay, it never situates successfully within the sizable genre it shares. At this stage of Rightfully, Beary Arms' development, Boston-based Daylight Basement Studio’s debut is left grasping at straws.

Rightfully, Beary Arms takes inspiration from plenty of contemporary genre hits. There are whiffs of classics Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon peppered throughout, but the gameplay issues, bugs, and overall incoherent design confuse any confident comparison. The disjointed and muddy pixel art (which pairs poorly with the 3D level geometry), shallow mechanical depth, and gummy controls all need an update to be ready for prime time, with its Early Access label seeming yet premature at this stage.

The Right to Arm Bears

A Bear in Pajamas? Make it Make Sense

Close

Players star as a bear in green pajamas named “Beary” – possibly a hat-tip to Gir in his green dog disguise from Invader Zim – who finds themselves on a spaceship with a talkative fox in a suit named Paul Stapleton. He leads a quick tutorial and grants a firearm, some currency, and a few short waves of simplistic enemies before the adventure properly kicks off.

There are familiar twin-stick components here, like a dodge, reload, and 360-degree aiming, but the timing, hit detection, and movement feel stiff and inexact. Small adjustments are especially muddled, implying some issue with the code that keeps returning the player sprite to a fixed coordinate, which makes dodging certain bullet patterns an exercise in frustration. The character “hurtbox” also feels accidentally massive.

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Rightfully, Beary Arms’ dodge function has admittedly improved over recent updates, but it’s still too stiff and lengthy, an invincible dash with a too-long delay at its tail. It’s the best tool for barreling right through the many bullets which manifest in the third biome and beyond, but the lack of available finetuning and the general unresponsiveness of the maneuver is a complete mechanical miss.

The Gun Puns Miss the Mark

Skill Trees Are Bland and Most Weapons Aren't Worth It

Admittedly, plenty of contemporary roguelites favor the skill-tree-to-success design, but Rightfully, Beary Arms doesn’t make it an exciting journey. The upgrades here fundamentally blend, with barest-percentile improvements to weapon damage, accuracy, health, and so on, and not a single exciting buff in the bunch. Having to spend increasingly enormous amounts of the game’s rare permanent currency to add a measly 3% to weapon accuracy makes for a virtually unrecognizable improvement.

That currency is called “Inspiration,” with other game aspects dubbed “Plu,” “Prooves,” and “Runtimes.” Do any of those names make sense right off the bat? They stand for currency, skill tree upgrades, and run modifier buffs, but the confusing nomenclature takes a while to get used to, and is never couched in any form of legible lore.

It sort of echoes Enter the Gungeon but, where that game steeped its silly language in copious lore and context-rich theming, Rightfully, Beary Arms’ often splats half-jokes and ideas against the wall with no coherent vision to tie everything together.

The weapons system doesn’t fare any better. There are perhaps a dozen or so weapons we’ve seen in our time with the game, with most of them in spitting distance of a groaning pun. The “A Salt Rifle" is a slow-firing (and confusingly phallic) salt shaker, the “Glockamole” is a green pistol which fires avocado seeds, and the “Mac 10” shoots macaroni. It sort of echoes Enter the Gungeon but, where that game steeped its silly language in copious lore and context-rich theming, Rightfully, Beary Arms’ often splats half-jokes and ideas against the wall with no coherent vision to tie everything together.

Still, that playful irreverence can work out if the mechanics are sound. Instead, the lion’s share of these weapons are mostly worthless, and swapping one of only two guns which can be equipped at a time in order to test-drive a new one deletes the equipped gun outright. With the overpowered weapon augmentations so precious and scarce, it hardly makes sense to ever swap something out even early on, as most base gun stats prove insufficient for later-game challenges.

Three Levels and A Remix Challenge Run

The Secret Biome is A Decent Baseline for Rightfully, Beary Arms

Rightfully, Beary Arms currently has three consecutive biomes, each comprising a few floors capped by a boss. Clearing those leads to a confusing and extended rotation of randomized maps of enemies before a secret boss appears, seemingly as placeholder for more authored content to come in the finished game. This victory lap also features a few new enemies, and the greatly increased variety does at least give the final Early Access level some juice.

Even successful runs prove to be fairly fast, and committed players can take advantage of an excellent map screen to plan quicker routes through the complexes. Rightfully, Beary Arms always starts off on a large spaceship, moves to a level built of docks over brackish waters (vulnerable to some atrociously fiddly fall damage), with the third biome a massive kitschy bowling alley.

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And still, none of these levels are connected to any available narrative. After defeating a boss, a few non sequitor insults are spat by a “Galaxy Master” – presumably the upcoming boss, though it's hard to tell – but it’s always the same text every time, which never adds any substantive story to follow.

There’s barely any variation to what’s found in the stages as well. Rooms are always a group of spawning enemies or a small shop. Some rooms are pointlessly massive, which will mean slowly trudging from one end to the other to blates crates for credits… Credits which players will then find nothing to do with, as meagerly upgraded guns are going to be more viable than any new purchase. It’s not uncommon to have 10k Plu and nothing to buy by the second biome besides a healthkit.

Final Thoughts on the Preview

This Bear Could Stand to Hibernate

Overall, there’s very little here to recommend in this current – admittedly early – build of Rightfully, Beary Arms. The fundamentals are weak thus far, the design feels half-baked and underdone – as recently as a week ago, enemy deaths were not even animated, but now most at least expire in a small cloud of pixels – and there’s no context for the action, or to support the scant scraps of color and character found in the key art.

Some of the game’s ideas are worth exploring, however. For instance, the game lets players select the chance at a few specific drops in each level, which is an interesting concept. However, this feature is never made available for the first level of each biome, which feels more like a mistake than a deliberate design choice. A “Calamities” system also adds a rotation of challenging enemy buffs, but the few we’ve seen come off more like game padding than cumulative skill checks.

It all amounts to Rightfully, Beary Arms not feeling ready for release, even more so than some other Early Access titles. So long as it coheres around its better ideas, puts some flesh on those bones, and adds some greater variety, it could right the ship from here on out. For now, the Rightfully, Beary Arms Early Access designation feels a tad too early.