Dezatopia: Shop Items and What They Do

One thing i’ve noticed that I need to figure out is that i’ve definitely gotten some upgrades without ever picking them up. The most noticeable ones are drill and curve, but i’ve also noticed the length increasing on the top gun and the bubble getting larger on the bottom. Initially I thought the “Power” upgrade gave a little bit of all that weapon’s powerups, but the top and bottom have also had this happen and those don’t have power upgrades. So either I am buying things at the wrong time and the chaos of the game isn’t making me realize it, or I am fundamentally missing something about the upgrade system…

Generally all purpose, provided the enemies are in front of your ship.

Power ⇢ Wave ⇢ Curve ⇢ Blast ⇢ Guard

• I’d have to do more testing to see what exactly power does and how much it affects things, but generally I find myself picking it up more often than everything else as I don’t exactly need the other upgrades this weapon provides.
• Wave and curve are good for vertical levels and clearing out hard to reach packs of enemies, but you only really need one of each if you want to go that route.
• Blast is another solid option and my second most picked upgrade, extra explosions never hurt anybody!
• In theory the front gun is the best suited role to put guard on, but usually I find myself wanting to increase it’s raw killing potential as it’s often my most used weapon.

The strange thing about the bottom gun is that it’s also used for utility- watering plants for animals is almost just as important as killing enemies with it. That much is taught in the tutorial, but the other oddity with it is it’s unique “stow mechanic”. Whenever you put your gun away, all of your water-bullets currently on screen cancel into water spears, which shoot in the direction of the closest enemy. This also happens automatically when water-bullets touch water… but not your water, the water found throughout some stages… augh, this is getting confusing…

Surprisingly powerful, considering there are a lot of situations where enemies are below you. I find that the smaller water bullets are not as exciting to use, so I tend to charge up a bunch of big droplets to send down instead. Watering plants is best achieved with the small ones though.

Break ⇢ Twin.L ⇢ Quick ⇢ C.Body ⇢ Guard

Just letting you know in advance: due to how weird this weapon is, this is definitely the gun I have the least information on. Thankfully some upgrades seem easy enough to understand, but I don’t have a good grasp on things like damage, firerate, numbers, etc.

• If you are doing a level that contains a lot of water, Twin.L is a must! Just know that if you hard commit into it, you’ll probably want to stow and un-stow your weapon a bunch over firing it normally.

The back gun can also be “aimed” to shoot in front of you, but I find this too inconsistently difficult to use often. With enough practice it could be used to increase damage from any direction.

Power ⇢ B.Fire ⇢ Homing ⇢ Drill ⇢ Guard

• The back gun is interesting because it’s the only gun where I find that every powerup feeds into eachother, I like getting a balanced mix of them. While this gun is probably one of the weakest at the start of the game, having a flurry of powerful, numerous drills that home into enemies feels amazing.
• The exception to above is obviously guard, which serves its own purpose. I honestly don’t get guard much at all, but I probably get it the most out of anything on the back gun- at the very least the erratic way the back gun moves lets it cancel more bullets.

The Top Gun is a mortar shot that fires in an arc, exploding on contact. It’s also the name of a 1986 american blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. The charged shot shoots a small cluster of shots before resuming normal fire.

It feels like the top gun deals the highest damage out of any of your weapons at the start of the game, however its high difficulty curve and lack of power scaling seems to leave it in the dust after a few stages. The explosions it causes are great for cancelling bullets, if they manage to hit something… at the very least it does decent boss damage if they’re hovering above you.

Spread ⇢ Length ⇢ Quick ⇢ Reflect ⇢ Guard

• I more or less never get upgrades for this thing unless I’m capped on money and have no other options. Its use case is far too specific and it doesn’t seem to increase in power much. The one saving grace for it would be if any of these powerups increase it’s damage, but I haven’t noticed anything during testing.
• This sounds like a perfect opportunity for guard to finally shine, but a bullet approaching from directly above WHILE you have this weapon out happens less often than you’d think. Might be decent in the tower climb.

Life is fairly self-explanatory, the cheaper ones give you one refill on your life bar while the more expensive ones named “MAX LIFE” fully heal you.

“MAX UP” increases your maximum life, but it costs the same price as a weapon upgrade. Whether you get additional life or a better weapon is up to you, but i’d personally rather have better guns unless i’m in a dire situation or the other upgrade choices i’m given are bad. Your max health doesn’t reset when you die, so if you manage to get one during a boss fight you know you’ll lose a life on you’ll have extra life going into the next attempt.

Bombs make you invincible for a long period, and deal high damage in a horizontal line. Unlike most other shmups/STGs, they don’t reset on death. However, being capped on bombs when you die means you’ll lose out on the bomb you get from respawning.

Bomb level seems to increase the damage, but consider that a WIP.