Most co-op games are loved primarily because of the sense of achievement at the end of the session and all the shared loot. As a top-down roguelite, Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted will be loved or hated for completely opposite reasons, ending with you swearing, shouting, and shooting your medic in the back for a stupid crown.
Lassos and Backstabbing
Bounty Brawl is a very fast-paced shooter that doesn’t waste your time on story. After you pick a hunter, you drop into a procedurally generated planet and shoot waves of enemies. That’s it! Oh, and you also set the stage for rage at every single member of your team.
We get eight characters to mess around with. They all have distinct primary weapons and unique specials. Kyle bounces trickshots around the room. It’s cool, but we really loved how Jaz just blows everything up with a rhythm-based rocket launcher. Kingka, on the other hand, wields a massive minigun. The best part is that she knows how to use it. And then there’s Xane with lightning-fast claw attacks, or Diddo with chaotic worm swarms. No matter the character, the shooting feels heavy and responsive. Oh, and we shouldn’t forget the star of the show—the lasso.
Everyone gets a very useful lasso that can be used to grapple across massive gaps, yank staggered enemies toward you for a massive finisher, or physically manipulate pieces of the environment.
The real fun is using it on your team. You will love it. They? Not so much. Especially if you’re feeling petty. You can use the lasso to pull a friend out of the line of fire—sure—but you can also drag them straight into a laser grid. We spent half our runs just griefing each other instead of actually dealing with the enemies. We guess that says more about us as co-op gamers. The swears we heard during some runs were priceless. We’ve accumulated hate that will last us for days.
Turning downtime into a frantic race
Between combat rooms, the Black Market is all about buying damage buffs or faster cooldowns. It’s important to keep in mind that the shop only stocks one of each perk. So, if your “buddy” buys the critical hit upgrade first, it’s gone forever. The devs are some masochistic dudes and dudettes who have this deep desire to constantly pit you against your team, even when you are supposed to be cooperating. We love that; we wish more games were like that.
All joking aside, yes, you end up actively arguing over who needs the health pack more, but when you’re in a good team, it’s surprising and refreshing how well we can cooperate and do our best to be understanding and help each other out. Maybe that’s what the devs wanted all along. Not to have you selfishly care about yourself, but to think more about your team members, learn how to suppress your selfish urges, and think and communicate as part of a whole.
Yeah, right.
Hunger Games on a whole different level
This is especially true when you hit a boss. Here, working together is a must. You are reviving each other and calling out attacks. But the second the boss hits the floor, the game completely flips. Friendly fire turns on. The game forces you into a sudden PvP deathmatch where there are no shared rewards. One of you, just one, can be a winner and gets the crown and all the bragging rights.
We guess this is where everything we’ve said in the previous paragraph doesn’t hold any water. It is absolute chaos. Camaraderie is an artificial term that holds no real meaning. Things that were funny before are dead serious now. It’s ironic: you spent ten minutes keeping your friends alive, and now you have to blast them in the back of the head.
A Sixteen Dollar Betrayal
Please don’t play this solo; we promise you, you will miss the point. Even though the standard roguelite progression is fine, the real magic, as you’ve surely noticed from everything that we wrote above, is the tension of playing with other people—especially people you know. The constant race to steal Black Market perks and the brutal PvP ending give it a nasty and, hopefully, hilarious edge. It’s also a very cheap way to find out what your friends really think of you. They say to find out a man’s true nature, have him starve for days. We say don’t go to that extreme; just let him play Bounty Brawl for a spell.
ID Card
- Developer: Nanuq
- Publisher: Infini Fun
- Platforms: PC (Steam)
- Release Date: May 28, 2026
- Genre: Co-op Action Roguelite
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