Megabonk

In September 2025 one person released a fifteen-dollar game about running away from monsters in three dimensions. Within two weeks it had sold a million copies. By October it was outselling Hades II as Steam's biggest new roguelike. Its developer then withdrew it from consideration at The Game Awards, campaigned for a Steam Award in the "Best Games You Suck At" category, and put a joke review about a man losing his wife, house and dogs directly into the store description.

Megabonk is a phenomenon, and phenomena are hard to review, because the interesting question is never "is it good" — 104,643 people have already answered that at 94% — but "what happens after the first thirty hours."

Why it took off

The pitch is simple: it's a survivors-like — kill hordes, collect experience, take a random upgrade, repeat until absurd — but in 3D, with a camera behind your character rather than above the field.

That change matters more than it sounds. In Vampire Survivors you read the whole battlefield at a glance and position against a two-dimensional pattern. Here you have depth, verticality, a horizon, and things you can't see behind you. Dodging becomes a physical skill rather than a spatial calculation, and the moment a run comes together — twenty items stacking, damage numbers filling the screen, a boss evaporating — lands harder because you're inside it rather than above it.

The unlock cadence is the other half. 20 characters, 70-plus items, 139 achievements, 240 quests. Early on, virtually every run ends with something new appearing, and that drip is calibrated beautifully. Reviewers describe nine-hour first sessions. At NZ$14.75, the content-per-dollar is close to the best in the genre — better than Brotato, better than Halls of Torment, which are both fine games at similar prices.

The complaint, which is the same complaint every time

Sort the negative reviews by helpfulness and they say one thing in different words, from people with serious playtime. The median playtime across the hundred most-helpful English negatives is 33 hours.

"The more you play the more you realise this is a mile wide and an inch deep," writes the top negative reviewer, at 87 hours. "The majority of items need a re-balance as most are useless. You can't get a good run going unless you use the 'meta' items." A 51-hour player counts it precisely: "there's at best 4 good tomes, and like 6 good weapons." A 22-hour reviewer in April 2026: "it feels like you're forced into a narrow set of builds just to reach the end, which takes away a lot of the fun. Build diversity should be encouraged, not punished."

This library has written before about randomised builders getting more random as their item pools grow. Megabonk has the mirror-image problem, and it's worse. The pool is large but the viable subset is small, so drawing well doesn't mean drawing interesting — it means drawing the six things that work. Every other item is a slot machine reminding you that you didn't get one.

The sharpest version of the critique came early, from a 14-hour player: the balance "has so many guardrails to prevent you becoming very strong because it seems that the devs are terrified of you becoming overpowered." That's a real design tension, and it's fatal in this genre specifically. The entire promise of a survivors-like is the power fantasy — that you start helpless and end the run as a walking apocalypse. A game that caps that on purpose is fighting its own premise.

Is it fixed?

Not yet, as far as the public record shows, and this is the part a 2026 buyer should weigh.

The developer patched energetically at first — a leaderboard and balance patch in October 2025, a map with fog of war days later, a substantial "Spooky" update in December that arrived late enough to be a Christmas present, a Christmas patch after it, and a hats update in January 2026. That's a solo developer working hard and communicating in a likeable, unpolished voice.

Since January 2026, the announcement feed has been quiet. Meanwhile the balance complaints keep arriving — nine negative reviews in February, ten in March, and a steady trickle through July. A 121-hour reviewer in January put the frustration in terms worth quoting: they feel content is balanced around what streamers do with hardcore meta builds, and ask "what the point of giving us so many weapons, tomes and builds is if we are essentially gonna have no choice but to use the same tomes and weapons."

None of that has dented the score — 93 of the last 100 English reviews are positive, at a 26-hour median — because most players are still inside the excellent first thirty hours. The people complaining are the ones who got past them.

A note on the achievement curve

Worth flagging for anyone reading the completion data: Megabonk's 139 achievements bottom out around 0.7%, which looks alarming until you notice the rarest are all hats — cosmetic collectibles added in the January 2026 update. That's not players quitting, it's players not chasing hats. The top of the curve, where item and unlock achievements sit between 93% and 96%, is the meaningful part, and it says almost everyone who buys this game gets properly into it.

One consumer warning

If you go searching the store for more Megabonk, be careful. A separate listing called Megabonk Apocalypse appeared on 9 July 2026 at NZ$24.99 — nearly twice the price of the real thing. It is not an expansion and not a sequel: it's by a different developer, TinyBig, and it's a game about using vehicles and weapons to destroy targets in ruins. Verify the developer name on the store page before buying; the game reviewed here is by vedinad.

The verdict

Megabonk earns an 8. As a piece of game feel it's the best argument the survivors-like genre made in 2025, the 3D perspective is a genuine contribution rather than a gimmick, and at NZ$14.75 it is one of the most generous purchases on Steam. The success is deserved and the solo-developer story is a good one.

What keeps it out of the higher reaches is that its depth doesn't match its breadth. Ten months of its most committed players have said the same thing — that the enormous item list resolves into a handful of real choices, that tier 3 asks for one build, and that the game seems reluctant to let you become as ridiculous as the genre promises. A rebalance would likely move this to a 9. It hasn't arrived, and the update feed has been silent since January.

Buy it anyway. Thirty hours of one of the best-feeling roguelites around, for the price of a sandwich, is an easy recommendation. Just don't expect the hundred-hour game the unlock list seems to promise — and if you want a survivors-like where build variety genuinely holds up at the top end, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is the one to compare it against.