Juicy Realm [Review]
Juicy Realm is charming roguelite with a short playtime.
A huge seed crash lands on Earth. It soon grows and blooms, blasting out spores that turn all the fruit in the world into its monstrous minions! Juicy Realm puts you in the shoes of a champion that’s got to fight to the source and destroy it to save the world.
I was immediately drawn to Juicy Realm by its look and was not disappointed. You fight your way through four levels, each its own environment with new enemies, and it’s all full of detail, color, and life. The cartoony fruits bounce along as they try to murder you, each uniquely animated; some have clever phases that made me chuckle. When you shoot up a lychee, its outer skin peels off and it panics. When an orange dies, it explodes into individual sectioned slices that try to pummel you. Juicy Realm is full of personality and the art really sells it.
The gameplay loop is standard top down shooter roguelite fare. You (and optionally a friend in local co-op) run through the randomly generated levels, killing fruit and picking up money, items, and weapons. Beat the bosses to earn seeds, the game’s upgrade currency, so that when you die and return to base you can upgrade your stats, unlock characters, or add new weapon types to the game.
Juicy Realm has ten playable characters, each with a unique special ability and varied health and speed stats. Some are easier to use than others with abilities that vary in usefulness; you can add some extra challenge to the game depending on who you pick. Special abilities include making a shadow clone, dropping a turret, having a renewable shield, summoning a mech, and more. You can use these anytime, as long as they’re not on cooldown.
During a run, you can carry two weapons at a time. This is one of the areas where the game really shines; weapons are varied, unpredictable, and funny. Maybe you’ll find a machine gun and a laser gun, or maybe you’ll end up with a bowling ball and a canon that fires chickens. Fortunately, you can always recycle weapons for cash. The only flaw here is that close-range weapons like swords aren’t viable in the game, or if they are I wasn’t good enough to do well with them.
Juicy Realm’s badge system isn’t unique, but has some nice touches. Badges offer boosts and status effects, like increased crit percentage or a chance for shots to slow down enemies. You can equip a limited number, though you also have a large inventory so you can swap badges easily. There’s a detail that makes the inventory even better—it’s shared by both players in co-op, so you never have to stress out in the moment over who gets what because you can easily make trades. Then comes the best part: if you pick up or buy a badge you already own, you’ll boost its level and make noticeable gains. With this, you can perfect your build over the course of a run.
A complete run took me around 45 minutes. After beating the game once, you open up hard mode, where you can activate random modifiers that make the game more difficult in exchange for seed reward multipliers. I completed a few runs even with all the available debuffs applied.
Juicy Realm is a very good roguelite. Its systems aren’t special outside of a few nice touches, but it’s got lots of characters, feels great to play, and its charm and beautiful art stand out. The unfortunate part is that considering how quickly I was able to complete some runs, I likely won’t keep playing it for long.
Juicy Realm, previously available on PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch, is now also on PS4 and PS5.
