Backlog Bloggery: Buggos

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Aywren

Buggos Steam Page

Buggos is a RTS auto battler where you play as a hive of alien bugs invading a planet and waging conquest over the human race. It’s presented in a retro pixel art style, and has a good sense of humor overall.

It does offer several difficulty levels, but even the basic level can be challenging if you don’t have the proper evolutions in place, or you attempt to raid a location that’s a bit out of your wheelhouse.

While this game calls itself strategic, it’s mostly about you directing the swarms of different kinds of insects, who have different sorts of abilities to locations on the map. While they overall do pay heed to your direction, they also have a mind of their own and often wander off to do their own destruction.

There’s an entire web of evolutions that allows you to expand upon the skills and bug types your hive has.

I learned the hard way that unlocking evolutions by beating the stages and earning evolution points is another major area of the strategy. For example, I attempted to play through a stage only find myself in a stalemate because I didn’t realize there was a stage that was slightly easier that I needed to clear first. With the points I earned there, I then unlocked the ranged buggo which helped give me the advantage I needed when I came back to try the stage again.

So, a lot of the strategy is just having the proper unlocks in the proper order to tackle the stages. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it might lead to a somewhat linear progression.

I put about an hour into this game – a good chunk of that was struggling with that one stage I mentioned earlier – and found the concept overall pretty fun. I can see the appeal of building up a swarm and unleashing them on the enemy, while earning points to further unlock new types of buggos and build up the swarm all the more.

Aside from directing the swarm, you don’t have a lot of interaction with this game, however. You can switch modes between gathering more resources, spawning faster, and attacking harder, but that’s really it. Most of it is you dropping a pin on the map to direct the swarm, then sitting back and watching how it resolves. If you fail, it likely means you need to rearrange your evolution points a bit.

This is satisfying, and when you come into a stage and you’re ready for it, you clear it fairly quickly. I saw a lot of reviews calling this a fun little time waster, and I’d agree. It’s certainly something simple you can pick up, play a bit, and put down.

However, at the full cost of $15.99, I’d suggest waiting for a sale. I got this as part of a bundle, so it was not something I bought outright at this price.

Comments