To top it all off, it doesn’t even fire in a predictable fashion.
Small rooms full of enemies are already death traps, and now you’re forced to time your shots while you dodge enemies to avoid getting caught in your own crossfire. In order to damage the enemies close to you, you need to fire tears, but if you fire tears you fire Bob’s Brain, and if you fire Bob’s Brain you end up damaging yourself.
If you have only average speed in a room of fast-moving enemies, this is essentially the “game over, hope you like your next run” item. If its bullets contact an enemy they explode, and if you happen to be in the enormous blast radius they take a substantial chunk of your health with them. It’s even worse than the excruciatingly slow fly because it seems to be actively trolling you. This is one of the familiars that follows you around and shoots in the same direction as you when you fire. Let this be a lesson to you kids – soy milk is gross and should be avoided at all costs.
Rooms take forever and it’s easy to get swarmed in cramped quarters while you try to chip away at a housefly. The increased rate of fire doesn’t offset the fact you are now lobbing something less damaging than actual tears, and it takes twice as long to kill most enemies. The rate of fire increase is nice, but it feels like you’re rapidly flinging peas at a tank. The bad news: your damage plummets to almost nothing, so have fun with boss fights now taking about ten minutes each. The good news: your rate of fire goes way, way up, giving you the ability to flood your enemies with tears.
It took all of my fortitude not to launch my computer out the window. The first time I grabbed this – not knowing what it was – I ended up making it to the Boss Rush and got hit while charging on the second-to-last pair of bosses. Now your goal is to get through every room without getting hit once while you’re charging – lest you have to start the whole thing over again! This essentially means that for next to no benefit, you stand a sizable chance of having to repeat an entire boss fight every time you get hit. Then comes the caveat that if you get hit while charging your shot you are immediately teleported out of the room and into some other random location and the minor annoyance grows into a tremendous frustration. So, in the best case scenario, this pickup is mildly annoying and utterly useless. The tears are not any stronger, and in the time it takes to charge you can probably already have connected with three to four tears anyway.