Being able to enter a sort of flow state is the hallmark of any good roguelite. Play through enough runs, and eventually you become much quicker at making the important decisions. You’re not quite on autopilot, but you’re locked in enough that pushing some of those buttons becomes second nature. Put all that together with the hypnotic magnetism of RACCOIN‘s literal coin pushing gameplay, and you’re looking at a dangerous formula that could blink away hours of your life just like that.
As the name suggests, RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike blends roguelike elements with the classic arcade cabinet game that has you pushing out coins through two pipes in an effort to push as many coins as possible into a scoring area. The top platform moves back and forth in hypnotic fashion, and you’ll spend most of your time looking at said platform, just hoping and praying it tips over enough coins to let you reach the next stage.
It sounds simple, sure, but you might be surprised to learn that RACCOIN is actually a lot deeper than it initially lets on. At the start, you’ll be dealing primarily with copper and silver coins, but in between levels, you’ll be able to buy special coins that come with all sorts of cool effects, and this is where the game truly shines.
There are sticky coins that stick to every coin they come in contact with. There are explosion coins that explode to help push coins into the scoring area. There are pig coins that breed on contact, spawning even more pig coins. There are wolf coins that hunt said pig coins and become worth a lot more points the more they hunt.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though, as there are so many other things to take into consideration. Chips are modifiers that can help make a run easier by increasing your score multiplier or spawning “worthless” cookie coins when you’re out of moves to help push other coins into the scoring area easier. There are also Prizes, which are one-use items that can really help to turn the tide, such as an umbrella that collects all coins in an area and puts them back on the top platform, or a UFO spawner that calls in a flying saucer to rain down extra coins on the cabinet.
While you’re in a level, you’ll also want to consider your score multiplier, which gives you access to a wheel spin that can give you additional boons, such as new Prizes to collect during the stage, or bonus coins to help with scoring.
It’s not all positive, though, as RACCOIN will throw a few bad coins your way after every couple levels. Some bad coins simply exist to take up space and will not increase your score, while others can raise shop prices, or make it harder for you to push existing coins into the scoring area. What’s interesting about RACCOIN is that the platform state carries over in between levels, so there’s no way to completely reset the cabinet aside from using Prizes to clear them out or score everything in the area. This forces you to really think about which bad coins are coming when, and how you can hoard your own special coins to counteract them when the time comes.
To make things even more chaotic, RACCOIN features a rather wide cast of playable characters to choose from, all of whom come with special quirks to make the game more enjoyable. The Botanist, for example, is the first character you’ll unlock after the Manager, and they specialize in animal-type coins. This means you’ll likely want to focus your strategy around deploying as many animal coins as possible, then using the wolf coin to eat them up, and score those wolf coins for a ton of points.
My personal favorite, though, is the Chemist, who specializes in Modifiers. These allow you to add a — you guessed it — Modifier to your special coins, making them even more effective. One Modifier makes it such that your coins can explode on impact, or cause that specific coin to show up more often in the shops. This adds to the chaos, but it also adds to the strategy, as you’ll finally have a viable way of manipulating the RNG to fit your play style for that run.
I’ve sunk about 20 hours into RACCOIN at this point, and I’m pleased to report that I’m still discovering new coins, Prizes, and Chips to play around with. Not to mention the fact that I’ve still yet to land on a character with a solid strategy that I want to stick with. Chances are good that I’ll keep playing with the Chemist because messing around with Modifiers are so damn fun, but I’m also equally excited to experiment with other characters and see what the rest of the special coins have to offer.
Where RACCOIN does ultimately fall short is in how quickly it ramps up the difficulty between levels. Like any good roguelite game, I don’t expect to get my first clear until I’m hours deep into the gameplay loop, but I couldn’t help but notice that the difficulty curve felt markedly steep here. There are a total of 15 levels standing between you and a full clear, and by the time you reach level 9, you’re looking at tens of thousands in point differentials, which just seems a bit off to me. I wish the ramp-up was a little more gradual, and I often felt like my runs would come to an end prematurely.
I’ll also note that there is a huge element of luck to RACCOIN‘s gameplay. While you will eventually unlock ways of manipulating the RNG to feed into your strategy, luck still plays a big part here. You can expect runs where you simply don’t get the right synergy of coins and Chips or Prizes for levels on end, or a string of bad luck bonus wheel spins that add nothing to your score. It could even be something as simple as your coins not falling into the scoring area fast enough for you to build up your score multiplier so you can reach the next threshold.
As fun as RACCOIN is, you do need to be ready to accept that there’s likely going to be a huge amount of variance between runs. That being said, RACCOIN more than makes up for the RNG grind by rewarding you with huge shots of dopamine when things do get going. There’s nothing more satisfying than watching all the coins on your platform form a huge tower stack before getting knocked over by the sweeping long neck of a well-placed giraffe coin, after all. Yes, that is a thing.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
