The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth Review

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

I know it’s a bit late, but here’s my review of this game. It has kicked my ass, on several occasions. And I love it.

 This game takes me back to the days of The Legend of Zelda before the Ocarina of Time, except it’s harder. The controls are simple; you move in all four directions and shoot tears in four directions. The way you move affects the tears speed and trajectory. I do recommend a controller for this game as the keyboard controls might be cumbersome for some. There’s a button that drops a bomb, another for a usable item, and another for a one-use item.

The main goal is to clear the floors boss in order to descend to the next one, while picking up power-up items that affect Isaac in one way or another.

Now, what makes this game is the randomly generated dungeons. Every time you start a new game, everything is randomized, the floor layout, the rooms, what items are on the floor, and the pills. There are multi-colored pills that have good, bad, and neutral effects. Some give you an extra heart, another takes away a heart, and one gives you bad gas.

Of course there are some things that carry over to every game. The more times you “beat” the game, there is a chance of more power-up items, new characters to play, and even more floors to get through. There are also unique rooms that you may run into, I won’t spoil anything, as at the core of this game is the sense of finding things out on your own. The one room I will mention is the store. You can buy items that can add an extra affect to Isaac, or if there aren't any items you want, you can donate your coins to the store. This helps upgrade the store, so the next time you come in there will be more items. This carry over’s to all future runs that you’ll do. You can even blow up the donation’s box to get a few extra coin to get the really good item.

Overall The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth has good game-play that punishes and pushes the player so much that when you’re able to beat a run it fills the player with a sense of overcoming great odds. Plus this game has all the re-playability in the world. This will definitely be one of the games I fall back to when it seems like I have nothing to play.