Paper Planet

Paper Planet is a roguelike in which you play as a turret, trying to fight off waves of enemies and bosses to protect your planet. You attack by shooting at the enemies, and there are a lot of different items you can get that can upgrade things like your firerate, damage, and pierce, as well as changing how your bullets act, how many bullets you fire, how fast your turret moves, and many other things. Movement consists of moving your turret clockwise or anticlockwise around the planet, as well as the ability to teleport it to the other side of the planet. There's a small marker opposite your turret on your planet, so you can see at all times precisely where you would teleport to.

The game has a fun, colorful artstyle. Everything is clear and easy to read, and while later on in the game there can end up being a lot of bullets on screen at once, there's an option in the settings to turn down the opacity of your own bullets so they aren't so distracting.
 

Enemies can shoot two types of bullets: red bullets and yellow bullets. Yellow bullets are dangerous to your turret, and you must move to avoid them. Red bullets are dangerous to your planet, so you must use your turret's shield to block them before they can hit your planet. You can't attack while shielding though, so you can't just have it up constantly. Enemies reaching your planet will also cause you damage, so you need to defeat them before they can reach it. These mean you're constantly on the move, dodging yellow bullets while trying to get over to the red bullets to block them, and this ends up giving the gameplay a fun sort of rhythm. 

In later waves, there are variations, like clusters of red bullets which will bounce and you'll need to block them multiple times to destroy them, yellow piercing bullets that will travel through solid objects so you can't just rely on your planet to block them, and fiery yellow bullets which when they hit your planet, will create a 'shockwave' of fire that will move across your planet, which you'll need to teleport past to avoid.

Defeating enemies gives you paperclips, which you can spend when you next reach a shop to buy health restores, a shield that can block one hit, and items for your run.

 

There are six 'zones,' each with 15 waves and a boss fight. Each zone will also contain a few waves that offer a selection of items to pick between, as well as a shop.

Most bosses, apart from the final boss, have one or two variants you can encounter in place of them, which helps to keep runs interesting and add some uncertainty to which boss variant you'll be facing. A few of the variants I find a little harder to deal with than the originals, but that may just be because I haven't encountered them as much, so I don't have as much practice fighting them yet.
 

The game has difficulty settings, with there being 'sugars' and 'spices' that you can enable to make an aspect of your run easier or harder respectively. Sugars do things like adding more item waves, making enemies move slower, and there's one that can disable damage entirely (though you can't get achievements with this one enabled.) Spices do things like make enemies move and attack faster, lower your starting health, and give bosses temporary damage reduction at the start of their fights, which gradually wears off over time.

Some of the game's achievements are for completing certain challenges, such as beating a run without losing your combo, beating a run without changing directions more than 10 times, or completing the first zone without missing a single shot. These were fun extra challenges to attempt, and some of them were really difficult, taking me a lot of attempts and practice before I finally succeeded. A few of these challenges, like beating a run with all spices enabled at their maximum level, I haven't yet managed to beat, though I did have fun attempting them so I may go back at some point and try again.
 

Unfortunately for completionists, there's a few achievements that seem to be bugged. When I played, the achievement 'this can only end well' seemed not to trigger, and one of the boss variants' logbook entries also wouldn't trigger, which made two achievements that involve said entry impossible. It's possible that these issues could be fixed in a future patch, though.
 

After each run, you'll earn a number of 'staples' depending on how well you did in your run. These staples can be used to unlock new items, and new planets to choose from. These planets have different mechanics that change how the game plays. For example, the plane planet turns your turret into a plane that can fly freely around in the sky, with your teleport turning into a dash. The square planet has four different sides, and each side gives you a different buff when your turret is on it. All the different planets are interesting, and some of them can be better than the default planet for some of the challenges, which helps incentivise you to try them out.

As well as all this, there's a lever in the game's settings you can pull to unlock everything for you, in case you've played before on a different file and don't feel like unlocking everything all over again, or if you just don't care for that sort of meta-progression and would rather have everything unlocked from the start.
 

I had a lot of fun playing this game! I really like the artstyle and the designs of all the bosses, the gameplay is fun and interesting, it was fun to unlock all the items and planets, and once I'd beaten a few runs, I enjoyed attempting some of the challenges!