PC Games

Published on September 24th, 2025 | by Daniel

Ammo And Oxygen – PC Review!

Ammo And Oxygen – PC Review! Daniel
Gameplay
Graphics
Audio
Value

Summary: An addictive, top down rogue-like survival thriller that will have you looking around every corner for each new threat, desperate to find that next tank of oxygen or ammo, to survive another day!

3.8

Oxygen desperation!


Ammo and Oxygen, is a sci-fi, top down, rogue-like survival horror game developed and published by indie studio Juvty Worlds, known for crafting games within the survival genre. Recently got its official 1.0 update and Stream release on the 7th of September after being on early access since November of 2024. And since sci-fi is really up my alley and encouraged by the promising trailers and footage at a glance. I was all too eager to give this interesting looking game a red hot crack.

The story is a rather simple one, you wake up in some sort of facility, it’s quickly made clear that you’re part of an expedition team to an alien planet. But you are alone, the station is damaged, corridors are filled with the blood and corpses of your fellow expeditioners. Debris, fixtures and fittings are strewn everywhere, you find a tool you can use as a weapon and begin to look for clues about what happened. The more you explore, the more you begin to remember, you find more, better weapons. Terminals scattered throughout the various facilities provide answers and flashbacks to memories within.

You must find all the answers you seek, but monsters lurk around every corner. Big ones, fast ones, flying ones, grotesque creatures that range from alien to strangely human in nature, transformed into fleshy abominations out to hunt any and all survivors. And you must do all that, whilst managing limited resources, Oxygen is as sparse and thus as treasured a resource as are the means to defend yourself. And with every death you experience, you find yourself waking within a small research hub. Each death only makes you stronger, faster, smarter, but don’t get too comfortable, each venture into the unknown is different. The layout you just spent hours getting used to, now seems unfamiliar, but press on you must and so you do.

In search of answers, to questions you don’t even know if you’ve already asked.

I love the premise of Ammo and Oxygen. It’s a kind of Groundhog Day-esque experience but in a procedurally generated sci-fi world where mystery and exploration can kill you just as easily as resources and aliens.

The gameplay is about as simple as the story, your job is to get as far as you can in as few days as possible. Find and use your resources wisely as you explore rooms, deserts, swaps, snowy mountains, reactor complexes, medical facilities, research stations. As you try to piece together the mystery of what happened to you and your expedition team and go home. There are three classes of weapons; melee, pistol, and general. Melee weapons and pistols are pretty self-explanatory. But general weapons range from sub-machine guns, to assault rifles, sniper rifles and miniguns. Then there’s the power weapons, these must be found during a run and you cannot spawn in with them, but are devastatingly powerful but need to complete a cooldown before they are usable again. You also need batteries, because of course you do. The batteries power your trusty flashlight and believe me, you’ll need it in some facility rooms or out in the open at night, where monsters are more aggressive and in larger numbers.

Oxygen is your primary resource and it is scarce, sometimes very scarce. In the first few runs of the game it’ll be your most important resource to manage and scavenge at every opportunity. Because, as one would expect, you suffocate very quickly without it. I can remember my first runs on the game, being rather frantic as I begged RNG to favour me just a tiny bit and present me with a fresh bottle of oxygen in the next room. You could get amazingly lucky and get a ton of good weapons, plenty of batteries and ammo, but be undone simply by a lack of oxygen. The same could be said about the opposite, there were definitely some runs where I was blessed with more oxygen than I could carry, but a severe lack of weapons/ammo to defend myself with.

With each death, you’re sent back to the hub which I imagine is designed as a sort of starting point for the exhibition. Here, all the scrap material and DNA samples you collected can be saved up or spent on upgrades. Once you find all the weapons of each category of weapon, you unlock the ability to upgrade them too. And after killing 350 creatures, you can upgrade even your space suit! Personal upgrades include; Evasion, Battery saving, movement speed and oxygen saving. Suit upgrades include: Starting armor, damage reduction, total health increase and healing regeneration per second. Weapon upgrades are vast but boil down to the basics; rate of fire, reload speed, ammo capacity and either damage or critical hit rate.

In my playthrough I focused mostly on oxygen and battery saving initially while I did not have access to weapon upgrades. Each time you upgrade, the next one costs a larger sum of parts/DNA, encouraging you to delve as deep as you can. Larger and stronger monsters yielding larger pools of DNA to upgrade faster. There are even some elite versions of some monsters, different in colour, much harder to take down but worth every extra bullet spent in DNA research.

I personally have a very love/hate relationship with rogue-likes because I tend to prefer repetition so I can learn patterns and exploit them. However Ammo and Oxygen does it in such a way that I find it addictive, I’m kept guessing about what rooms I’ll get every run, where monsters and resources will respawn but never so oblivious that I crawl around in fear of what lurks around every corner. I can approach and tackle most challenges head on but with enough apprehension that I don’t mindlessly charge into a room yelling LEEROY JENKINS without expecting to get immediately punished. It’s a delicate balance that the studio seems to have got just right.

Ammo and Oxygen, will have you desperate for, well, ammo and oxygen!

I also really like the style of the game too, it’s a top down survival action thriller. But everything still looks and feels 3D and the attention to detail in every room, every item and every monster is pretty good too. Nothing that would blow any socks off for best looking game of the year or anything. But incredibly solid and thoroughly detailed. You know what batteries look like the moment you see them on screen, you know you’ve found an oxygen tank when you see it in the next room. You can easily tell what weapon you just found, or what monster you barely survived a charge from just by looking.

Most objects of interest are visible on the map and searchable locations are marked with a dot on screen to separate them from identical looking objects. Sure you’ll come across a lot of reused assets later in the game but it makes sense because the teams of people that set up all these facilities use the same technology, so it’s not unreasonable to find barrels that look the same for the 1000th time or the same destructible crate you’ve been smashing since the moment you landed.

One aspect I really like is the dynamic lighting, some rooms will have no light source and the transition from dimly lit, to pitch black is simply perfect. It sets the mood and makes me question if I should spend some of my critically low battery reserves just to see what’s in front of me or risk getting ambushed by a sea of monsters I couldn’t see. In particularly infested regions of facilities, there’s an ominous orange glow, viscous tendrils snake up the walls and across the floor, ending in bulbous sacs that emit this eerie orange glow and it really sets the tone for what sort of freaky things were going on in these facilities that you are yet to uncover.

Take the picture below for example, there was a moment in a run I had just started, in the medical facility. The very first room was almost entirely intact, almost pitch black, emergency lighting glowed along the walls, a set of barricades formed the basis of what would be a line of people trying to check in, on the far wall was what would have been a staff desk not unlike any hospital or general practice centre. A pair of red warning lights in the back signaling a critical situation, their glow cut up by a protective grid that would have protected the staff behind them. It was a kind of eerie calm, you know something is wrong but at first glance, nothing seems overly out of place. It’s this kind of setting that is the perfect mood maker for a suspense thriller.

The sound department is where I feel that Ammo and Oxygen may have missed a few opportunities. The general ambience of the game is perfect, a sort of low hum, with a deep but barely there bassy drone and a higher pitch eerie note that really fits with the “lurking around every corner” sorta vibe. It fits with the space theme too because it’s like the quiet, deadly loneliness of space. You’re completely on your own (when playing solo) and you really feel like it with the general ambience. Some rooms have an electric whirring or a static pulsing as you come across different environments, and all the monsters conveniently announce their presence with a unique screech, scream, growl or roar to signify they have detected you, which comes especially handy on solo runs.

The game even has some cassette tapes you can find along your journey, ranging from extra eerie themes, all the way into some more intense, electro synth tacks perfect for a little techno sci-fi DOOM action.

But it all falls a little flat, they’re not on a perfect loop and sometimes the music comes to complete silence. This might work if it was timed to certain parts of the game, maybe hinting at something nearby, like a point of interest or a boss fight or something. But it’s completely random, the track might simply end, like it suddenly “ran out of tape” one might even say. The track simply fades away and you’re left there in eerie silence that doesn’t quite fit. It’s a little immersion breaking, especially at first, because I simply thought that maybe something happened to the game and I’d lost the music track completely, only for it to come back a moment later.

Ambient effects are good though, doors make a lovely sci-fi whirr of compressed air and mechanical parts. Guns all have their own unique sound effects, and you really get a sense of the upgrade in power as you find every higher weapon. Even if the damage difference between each is or isn’t actually much different, it definitely sounds and thus feels more powerful. And that’s always a welcome plus; there’s nothing quite like the power fantasy of a booming revolver or rifle, or the spooling of a minigun. Very nice.

To conclude, Ammo and Oxygen is a surprisingly great game. What it does well, it’s really good at. And the most important thing here, is that you can tell it was made with love, passion and dedication. I don’t know how big the team at Juvty Worlds’ is or how many had a hand in making this game. But it was clearly made with a lot of passion and the game comes together surprisingly well. Even after I got all the footage I needed for my piece, I found myself going back for more because I wanted to see how far I could get and how much of the in-game lore I could find.

It says a lot when I go back and keep playing a game even after I have enough material for a review. I’m pretty hard to please and this game was a lovely surprise. Areas of improvement would be the story, while it’s there, I did hope it might be a little bigger than simply finding logs to explain what little mystery there was. I’d really kill for an expanded audio, more sounds, music, you name it. The Sci-fi genre has a massive amount of music that could have fit in this game and I’d love to see more of what they could do, perhaps just better deployment of the audio that’s already there would go miles to improve the experience. Use the eerie silence to your advantage, maybe have a monster spawn and attack in the gaps between tracks, or maybe just blend it in so that the track immediately repeats with less cut off.

The game also features local and “network” play with friends. I say network in quotation marks because you don’t actually invite them to join a lobby with you, you basically stream your game with the invited players and they play through your game with you. It’s a little janky to get set up at first and not a method I would recommend in future, but it worked and my friend and I had some good fun playing together. I didn’t get to test out local play, but I can’t imagine four people squeezing into my room and all clamouring for a spot to get the best point of view at my monitor screens. I’d love to give this a try with network play at some stage if I ever manage to persuade enough of my friends to get this game.

All in all, a great experience. I didn’t have much in the way of game breaking bugs personally. And the AI can be easily goaded into path blocking objects. But for the most part, the game runs wonderfully at ultra, 6oFPS and in both windowed and fullscreen options. I would have liked a borderless window option, because tabbing out of the game minimises it and that messed with the position of my screen recording for gathering content. But ultimately, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Big thanks to Juvty Worlds for providing Impulse Gamer and myself with two codes so that we were able to test out the co-op features!

Game Details

Game Genre – Sci-Fi, Action Rogue-like
Developers Juvty Worlds
Publishers
Juvty Worlds
Rating – MA
Year of Release – 2025
Platforms – PC (Steam)
Mode(s) of Play – Single player, Multiplayer

You can find my other articles right here


About the Author

Hi I'm Dan! 33 and Non-Binary. When I'm not writing reviews. I like to get deeply immersed in the lore of an mmo or rpg, cruise the forest or coastal roads of Victoria, watch anime, read manga, build model kits and do a bit of sketching on the side.



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