don't give up THAT easily!! jeez, you could always blast your way in ~Chara
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enthusiast enthusiast
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Best with a bullet, if you'll pardon the expression. The spread on the shots gives this a totally different function up close (enough damage to kill pretty much anything) versus far away (weak damage but easy to hit, perfect for split-second aiming or killing a bunch of enemies). The geometric shot pattern is as satisfying to see as it is to plan around. Its discard ability—dashing in any direction—is powerful without requiring laser precision and flexible without rendering routing puzzles obsolete. The real clincher is the extra speed boost and destructive aura you get upon hitting the ground, which provides an intriguing but approachable learning curve unmatched by any other weapon. The epitome of everything great about Neon White.
The most controversial entry on this list, at least within my own heart. I came very close to rating this much lower. It has two characteristics I really dislike: randomesque spread on its bullets and high-precision alignment requirements on its bomb jumps. However, neither of these are nearly as bad as the worst offenders (see below), and in every other way this weapon is excellent. It's unusual in effectively having three modes: normal shooting, bombing enemies, and bombing yourself for extra movement. Even the arc on the bombs is satisfying, straight enough to be easy to aim bow paying just enough homage to gravity to have a sense of weight. A flawed masterpiece.
I love a good sniper rifle, and even scopeless this one is great. It's perfectly tuned: this can one-shot any of the weaker enemies, but takes half or more of its store of ammunition to kill tougher foes. Its horizontal dash discard ability is the bread and butter of many routes. Godspeed isn't flashy, but if either half of it weren't in the game its absence would be felt intensely. The queen of role-players.
The Katana's not much for offense and lacks a discard ability entirely, but as a die-hard parry fan I gotta give it some shouts out. Being able to reflect bullets is cool and, frankly, underutilized by the game. This also provides a learning arc as you grow to understand the speed boost it provides and learn to incorporate that into your runs. If this weren't so narrow, it would certainly rate higher. A clever addition.
Another solid little role-player. Unlike Godspeed, the shots doesn't really bring anything interesting to the table. It's just the generic weapon: one shot per click, one damage per shot, nothing more to say. Like Godspeed, the discard ability is necessary to the fabric of the game, and it even has some depth in the way multiple activations interact with one another depending on how close together you use them. The porridge of guns.
Worth a chuckle. An amusing jape.
I understand that weapon accuracy is a standard FPS knob to turn, but it feels extremely out of place in a game about precision and repetition. I'm aware that the shot pattern isn't truly random and perhaps it barely presents a problem to highly-skilled players, but for the rest of us this weapon feels capricious and any route that relies on shooting it more than a few feet away is a roll of the dice. That said, I do appreciate how different its discard effect is, and particularly the way that it can make you go faster or slower depending on its context. The wild card.
There comes a point when a weapon puts too much power in the hands of the player, and that point is named "Dominion". The chapter that introduces this has a totally different character to the rest of the game, because any normal level design would be trivialized by the combination of explosion-jumps and grapples Domnion provides—to say nothing of the fact that it can one-shot enemies from any distance. Route-finding becomes a slog when the levels have to be so open any path could be valid. Executing on those routes is even worse, constantly demanding near-perfect snipes and a particular whiplash movement where you turn the camera behind you just long enough to rocket boost a couple times and then back in front to grapple.
"But Natalie, what's the problem? Didn't you say precision was the point of the game?" That's exactly it. Precision is already built into the game's DNA; every level, no matter how straightforward, is going to demand high precision to climb the leaderboards or even just beat your own best time. The entire arc of the design bends towards requiring precise movements and accurate clicks. Weapons that double down on that don't add anything new, they just push even slow execution of good routes out of more players' hands. Too much of a good thing.
Speaking of weapons that completely ruin routing! Flavorfully, the Book of Life needs to be the most powerful thing going but G-d knows it causes some deeply fucked up routes. I don't know what the goal of giving the teleport-and-kill action unlimited range was, but in practice the effect is that every routing puzzle just becomes "what bizarre angle can you find under or around the level geometry where you can see an enemy close to the end." This one-time world record even uses it to move through a window! And on top of that, it doesn't even have the variety of a normal weapon or even the "blow shit up" coolness of Dominion. The worst weapon in Neon White.
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