Poly Review – a Free, Minimalistic, Bullet-Heaven Shooter

Poly is a free, minimalistic, top-down bullet-heaven shooter that eschews impressive graphics for a straightforward, and sometimes enjoyable gameplay loop. In fact, it looks so simple, that you are literally a circle that walks around with a gun shooting triangles, squares, and other abstract shapes.

At the beginning, you choose from one of four characters, all of whom use a unique weapon. The allrounder and shotgunner are what you’d expect. They wield a machine gun and a shotgun. Both are effective, but not unique. The most surprising, and frustrating, is the Grenadier. With him, a large grenade flies in front of you, stops, and then explodes shortly thereafter. I wanted to try it longer than I did, but I kept dying from my own explosions, so I moved on to the Electrician. With him, he can shock multiple enemies at once without even having to aim. I found him pretty fun, but also interesting with his initially short range.

Like other games in the genre, after certain points cards appear on the screen that allow you to upgrade your character. Some of the upgrades that can be acquired include increasing the size of your bullets, movement speed, or even the amount of area you can see on the screen at once. This effectively zooms out the camera over your character. Some items do a combination of improving stats while also hampering others. There is a good deal of strategy involved when picking different selections between levels. One thing that really irritated me was that there is no experience system in the game. You cannot level up in the middle of a stage. All upgrades occur between levels. Additionally, even though enemies drop what seems to be money or experience, these items didn’t seem to do anything. Maybe I just missed something.

The sound design as a whole is pretty poor. While playing there seemed to be only one track of music. It was a bit repetitive, but I never felt like turning it off. I actually kind of liked it. On the other hand, the sound effects were not very strong. While there were sounds for explosions or shooting your gun, they were not very satisfying. Also, some other portions of the game did not have sound effects where you’d expect. For example, when the cards appear on the screen, the sound effects are effectively absent. For the sound design, the game has an odd mix of things being pretty good while others are unsatisfactory.

Which sadly, is a good summary of the game. It has some fun moments; but it’s also incomplete. In fact, within a few weeks of the game’s release, the developer shared a final version 1.0 update and then announced that he was not going to work on the game any further. That is a shame because with a few more months of development time, this title could be really quite fun! I think the developer has talent, and I wish him well in his future projects. As it stands now though, it’s enjoyable, but I don’t feel compelled to return to it after trying out all the different characters. Check it out if you’re curious, but don’t go out of your way to do so.

Title: Poly
Genre: Top-down Bullet-heaven Shooter
Year Released: 2025
Developer: Joe Rickwood
Played On: Steam
Price Paid: Free

Remember, we can have different opinions about the games we play. If you like something more (or less) than I do, both of our perspectives are valid.