SULFUR Review

SULFUR is a single-player extraction roguelike where you dive into procedurally generated dungeons, scavenge weapons and ingredients, cook buffs at campfires, and decide when to bail with your loot. Its biggest strength is a gun-crafting system that lets you bolt on parts, oils, and enchantments until a pistol feels like your pistol. Its biggest problem is that the game keeps yanking that feeling away. With an 89% positive rating across thousands of reviews, the core is clearly working—but the friction is real, and it often comes from the design itself.

The Loot-and-Shoot Loop

The core loop lands hard. Players describe the tension of choosing when to extract, knowing death strips everything you carry. One player with over 60 hours recalls losing a beloved loadout after glancing away for three seconds, then shrugging it off as a 10/10 moment. That’s the fantasy: high stakes, real loss, and a reason to care about every corner you check. The catch is that the game sometimes undermines its own tension with uneven enemy spawns—one player describes stretches of nothing followed by a room with 37 enemies and 5 elites. When the difficulty spikes feel arbitrary, the loss stings less like a lesson and more like a shrug.

Gunsmithing That Spoils You

The gun modding is the star. Players rave about the freedom to build the same weapon in wildly different ways—one review highlights using an oil to reload a massive machine gun almost comically fast, another enchants a magnum to fire homing bullets. The system is deep, tactile, and full of discovery. But it comes with a trap: once an oil or enchantment is applied, it can’t be removed individually—only wiped entirely. Players who experiment with the wrong oil can ruin a gun they spent hours leveling. That’s not a difficulty curve; it’s a punishment for curiosity, and it sours the very system the game does best.

Cooking, Seriously

The cooking system is a genuine surprise. Players call it more fun than the gunfights, and one jokes that SULFUR is really an extraction cooking game with guns attached. Finding ingredients, experimenting at the campfire, and hauling buffs into the next fight adds a layer of planning that feels fresh. But the recipes are almost entirely trial-and-error, with little in-game guidance. One player describes standing at the pot for half an hour, shuffling ingredients, before finally giving up and looking up a guide. The joy of discovery curdles into tedium when the game refuses to teach you the basics.

Balance and Boss Fights

Here’s where the good will evaporates. Since launch, players say the developers have repeatedly nerfed strong builds—infinite ammo, energy weapons, specific oils—rather than lifting weaker options. One player with over 140 hours calls it a constant gutting of anything that works. Bosses compound the frustration with forced invulnerability phases: you can stack a shotgun build that theoretically deals over 10,000 damage and still watch the boss lock its health bar and drag the fight out. When a game sells itself on buildcraft, invalidating those builds at the boss door feels like a betrayal. The result is a meta that punishes creativity instead of rewarding it.

Maps, Storage, and the Grind

The later biomes sprawl into mazes, and players report getting lost repeatedly, especially in the desert and frog-ninja zones. Enemy density spikes, with shielded crows and fast ninjas that swarm without warning, and the framerate can dip when the screen fills with bodies. Storage is another sore spot: players who want to collect weapons and hoard ingredients hit the stash limit fast, and the lack of workshop support means mods are the only relief. The economy also sags—players describe runs in mid-to-late zones that actually lose money, because loot drops and hidden rooms have become so rare. The grind starts to feel like work, not adventure.

Onboarding and Performance

New players are thrown in with almost no tutorial. Oils, scrolls, and even the gun-modding bench are poorly explained, and one review notes the bench itself is easy to miss. The learning curve is steep, and the game’s habit of hiding crucial info makes it steeper. Performance issues, including frame drops during busy fights, add another layer of frustration. None of this is fatal—players who push through often get hooked—but it raises the barrier for anyone on the fence.