Shard Squad

Twenty elemental critters, one crowded genre

Shard Squad is the debut commercial release from The Root Studios, a four-person Brazilian studio, published by Nuntius Games and Vsoo Games, released 10 November 2025 for Windows. Director Rennan Costa has described the game as starting life as a Unity learning project before positive feedback from early prototype testers encouraged the small team to develop it into a full release. Structurally, it's a survivors-like: players choose a Shard, one of over 20 collectible elemental creatures spanning Fire, Electric, Water, Nature and Crystal types, and fight off escalating waves of enemies across stages in the world of Mellunia, unlocking additional squad members by defeating bosses and combining Shard traits for passive synergy effects along the way. Meta-progression carries between runs through permanent upgrades and unlockable relics, and the game supports both local split-screen and online co-op alongside its core single-player mode.

Charm and creature design that reviewers keep praising

The most consistent thread running through Shard Squad's large review corpus is enthusiasm for its presentation. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically praise the game's pixel art and creature designs, with multiple detailed reviews explicitly comparing the Shards to Pokémon and Digimon for how much personality and visual variety the roster carries despite the genre's usual emphasis on raw enemy-swarm spectacle over character design. One detailed review specifically frames the game as "a roguelike version of Pokémon meets Vampire Survivors," crediting a wacky, colourful cast of enemies and bosses for standing out in an increasingly saturated genre. Co-op support draws its own specific credit, with reviewers noting local and online play let friends join in without disrupting the core game's pacing. A meaningful portion of the review base also specifically praises the game's later-stage difficulty, describing genuinely complex boss attack patterns and enemy density that push back against any assumption a cute, colourful survivors-like will play passively, with one detailed reviewer noting tanky enemies and near-unavoidable attacks in later stages actively punish glass-cannon builds and reward a more defensive playstyle.

The two loudest voices in the room are negative

Set against that praise, Shard Squad's review base carries a genuinely unusual dynamic: the corpus's single two most-voted reviews, by a wide margin, are both detailed negative verdicts targeting the same core complaint. Both describe the level-up loop as fundamentally shallow, arguing that beyond an initial choice of ability, the overwhelming majority of level-up decisions boil down to maxing a single damage stat simply to keep pace with scaling enemy health and numbers, rather than offering the kind of build-defining choices genre peers are known for. One of those reviews argues bluntly that "there are enough Vamp Survivors games on the market that there's really no excuse for the designers fumbling this hard on the core gameplay loop," specifically criticising a structure where players effectively choose between "a damage increase to keep up with the scaling enemies, or [using] your single ability more times to kill each enemy" as the loop's defining decision for most of a run. That level of specific, high-visibility agreement between the corpus's two loudest negative voices is worth taking seriously, even inside a review base that remains Very Positive overall.

Meta-progression and marketing claims draw further specific pushback

A related, independently repeated complaint concerns permanent meta-progression between runs, which multiple detailed reviews describe as insultingly small in impact, citing examples like a single percentage point of critical-hit chance or movement speed gained per costly upgrade tier, alongside a currency-grind rate several reviewers call disproportionately slow relative to what those upgrades actually deliver. A further, specific and pointed complaint concerns the game's own marketing: one detailed review, backed by twenty hours of playtime, argues the pitch promising a "20 hour campaign with animated cutscenes and voice acting" oversells what's actually closer to a 6-hour story mode containing only two scripted scenes, with voice acting that reviewer specifically and repeatedly calls poor enough that the game would be better without it entirely. That same review, along with others, also pushes back on marketing the game as a genuine "creature collector," arguing the underlying structure is closer to "a Vampire Survivors clone with unlockable characters" than anything resembling a collection-and-team-building RPG. A smaller but specific complaint concerns character balance, with reviewers citing specific abilities, like a poison damage-over-time effect that reviewers say stays fixed regardless of upgrades, that fail to scale against rising enemy health and leave entire Shards close to unplayable in later stages.

Origins, ambition and a debut team's growing pains

Worth noting alongside the review base's specific complaints is the context of Shard Squad's origin. The Root Studios is a four-person team, and director Rennan Costa has described the project publicly as beginning life as a personal Unity learning exercise before early testers' enthusiasm pushed the team toward a full commercial release, alongside designers Denis Espanhol and Gabriel Raposo and pixel artist Richard Novak. Several of the review base's more sympathetic critics explicitly frame their complaints about shallow scaling and thin meta-progression in that light, treating them less as evidence of a lack of ambition than as the predictable growing pains of a small, first-time commercial team tackling a genre, and a creature-collector hybrid specifically, that even established studios routinely struggle to balance. That framing doesn't erase the specific, detailed complaints from the corpus's two most-voted reviews, but it does help explain why a review base otherwise willing to be pointed and specific about the game's weaknesses still lands, in aggregate, on Very Positive rather than Mixed.

Value

At NZ$10.49, Shard Squad sits at a modest price for a genre this crowded, and most of its large review base considers the game's art, creature designs and co-op support a fair trade even where its deeper systems draw specific criticism. The Very Positive score, 547 positive against 94 negative across 641 reviews, still reflects a review base broadly won over by presentation and ambition, but the prominence of its two most-voted reviews, both detailed, specific and negative on the same core progression complaint, marks Shard Squad as a genuinely more contested release than its headline score alone suggests. For fans of the survivors-like genre drawn specifically to its creature-collector aesthetic, Shard Squad is worth a look at its low price, with the understanding that its build depth and meta-progression pacing draw real, detailed pushback from a vocal and well-supported minority.