Megabonk review

Skate Story, Pro Skater 3+4 Remake, dodgy free-to-play Skate… 2025 was a big year for fans of four-wheel-planked fun. But none of those pretenders could beat Megabonk, secretly the greatest skating game of them all. That’s because Megabonk stars Calcium, the skateboarding skeleton in sunglasses who throws bones at monsters while kickflipping out of attack range. I love him. I would die for him. Oh, he’s clearly already dead? Well, I’d die for him anyway.

Megabonk is ridiculous. It stars a knight called Sir Oofie and a shirtless hunk called Megachad. You microwave items to clone them, just like how real microwaves don’t work. One character is described as ‘the Megabonk Discord bullied me into adding this character’ and another one is called Birdo, which I’m sure Nintendo’s lovely lawyers would agree is all in good fun.

And it is good fun. It’s a game about wandering around auto-attacking as many monsters as possible. You pick a hero (did you really have to pick Megachad?) and then spawn in a procedurally-generated map full of chests, totems, shrines, and a crucial boss gate that you need to track down. You’ve got ten minutes to find that gate and spawn the boss before waves of angry ghosts come to finish you off.

Before the spirits show up, hundreds of other monsters would like to say hello. They’re constantly spawning and closing in from all sides. You have to focus on dodging enemies, timing those auto-attacks, gathering the precious experience gems monsters drop, and making sure you’re buffed enough by the time you face the final boss. It plays like an action-RPG on permanent fast-forward, where you’re never more than a few seconds away from levelling up or collecting another reward to enhance your bonking abilities (oh grow up).

If Megabonk’s developer claimed they’d never heard of Vampire Survivors in a court of law, we’d likely have to reinstitute the death penalty. Megabonk is indebted to that game to the point of bankruptcy. But a crucial part of Vampire Survivors’ success was its accessibility. A 2D game that could be played entirely with your mouse has a lovely low bar to entry. Moving things into three dimensions was always going to risk complicating that winning formula.

Megabonk succeeds by justifying the leap to 3D with smart design decisions elsewhere. Its procedurally-generated levels aren’t just vast barren fields. They’re messy collections of painful drops, bottlenecks, and rewards tantalisingly out of reach. You’ve got ten minutes to explore it all before the game really tries to kill you, and it’s impressive how much replay value you’ll get out of exploring just three levels (not that a few more wouldn’t have been nice).

Exploration is rewarded with chests everywhere, shrines that give buffs for momentarily staying put, and dodgy salesmen who always say “thanks idiot” after a purchase. Optional bosses can be spawned, graves can be desecrated, and secrets can be discovered by purchasing more jumps for everyone’s favourite skateboarding skeleton.

The charmingly lo-fi look means it can have hundreds of enemies on screen at once without breaking a sweat. Megabonk understands the joy of cutting through crowds as well as Dead Rising did at its peak. Truly blessed runs, where you’re a near-invincible tornado of death, are just rare enough to make them always feel like an accomplishment rather than an inevitability.

If you do take on the final boss far too early and win, the game will reward you. It’ll also reward you for using certain weapons, levelling up mystical tomes, moving around, and possibly even for just turning the game on or reading this review. Its 108 Steam Achievements don’t even cover all the stuff it’ll shower praise and rewards upon you for. The opening hours are generous almost to a fault.

That’s because the game is bribing you. Once you’ve cleared all the easier challenges and Megabonk finally turns off the generosity taps, it’ll have its hooks too deep into you to care. A game with just three levels has no right being this replayable, but its unlocks are so fun that jumping straight back in for more is irresistible.

A monkey who tosses deadly bananas and who can climb any obstacle has to be tried immediately. This ninja-character seems surprisingly useless, but I’m only 15,000 kills with them away from unlocking something potentially better. Megabonk’s core loop is ridiculously moreish, and it knows how to offer a breadcrumb trail of potential rewards that’ll have you justifying yet another go.

That’s how you end up losing 45 hours to it before suddenly realising the review you’re supposed to be writing was due days ago. Ah, but what’s another ten minutes, eh? Especially when I’m this close to unlocking a man with a dice for a head. I bet he’s exactly what my life has been missing and when I unlock him I shall never feel sadness again.

It doesn’t hurt that even its fiddlier quests are never so demanding that you can’t enjoy it with a podcast on. By adding just a little bit of structure and that time limit, it doesn’t fall into that rut these games occasionally stumble into, where you’re basically untouchable and are just wandering through enemies waiting for some challenge to come back in. Even the most blessed Megabonk runs have some treasure still to be found or will be over soon regardless. That a successful run often ends with your little guy constantly regenerating his health while ghosts pinball them all over the map is a treat in itself.

Challenges add yet more replay value. Some of these are simple speedrunning affairs, or spawn lots more enemies. The best seem completely impossible, like surviving the whole ten minutes without being able to move. That’s the kind of brutally unfair optional nonsense I like. I’m less happy with the rare moments when the game seems unfair through rigid design choices, like a late-game boss with a surprise insta-kill. What skill was that testing, clairvoyance? Indoor lava-floored temples get old too, as the game’s far less fun when it’s demanding precise platforming from you.

These are minor missteps in what’s become a solid Steam Deck favourite. Giving such a winningly accessible game the 3D treatment was always going to be tricky. Megabonk’s most impressive achievement is that it makes it tough to imagine going back to two dimensions.