Shard Squad Reviews

Review snapshot
Reviewed on: 7 June 2026
Achievements available at time of review: 69

Quick completionist overview
A great Bullet Heaven game in which you make a team of creatures to tackle each new stage. While grinding for resources for meta progression. Completion takes around 25h, the game has no missable achievements.

Achievement overview
Approximate time to 100%: Around 25 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: It is a roguelite; you'll play all the stages several times
Is there a good guide available: Yes, here is a guide for unlocking all the relics, and this guide will explain how to unlock the last character after beating the game.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding achievements: Yes, to unlock all the relics, you have to spend over 50,000 coins on recipes; this is a huge grind.
DLC-only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
Gamepad or mouse and keyboard: I preferred to play with a controller

About the game
In Shard Squad, you play as a character who tries to find his missing friends. However, the story isn't the main focus; this game is all about the Bullet Heaven gameplay. In some way, it is your typical Bullet Heaven, where you start off weak and unlock resources with each run to get stronger. However, there are quite a few things that make this game unique. In each level, you not only have the hordes of enemies to kill and bosses that will spawn and you need to defeat, but there are also orbs. If you kill those, you get an upgrade for that run, and there are challenges. In each level, you will find a few different challenges. Those pop up during the run and will tell you how to complete them at that moment.

What I love about Shard Squad is how you unlock new characters and relics. You have to do something special to unlock each of them, and it was quite addictive to try and combine as much as possible to unlock a bunch of stuff each run. You can unlock them one by one if you don't want to bother trying to find the combos to unlock a bunch; however, for me, that is where the fun was, figuring out how to unlock multiple at the same time.

The only downside I found in Shard Squad is that the screen can get quite busy with all the different attacks. And with how colorful the screens are, and with your team members and enemies being very colorful, it can be an overload of info. However, there are options in the menu to add more transparency to your team members and their effects.

About the achievements
None of the achievements are missable. Most of the achievements are for unlocking each character. And a bunch of others are for having a full team + a specific relic equipped to get the maximum bonus in a specific type, for example, the fire trait or the Magical Girls trait.

There are also achievements for just unlocking everything, all the stories, all the characters, and all the relics. The one where you have to spend 50k coins on recipes will take quite a while to grind. So choose many "chest" rewards while playing through the levels, which give you 500 coins.

Final thoughts
I enjoyed Shard Squad a lot! As stated above, I loved figuring out ways to unlock a bunch of stuff in the same run. Trying to optimize a run. Which sometimes failed, but most of the time worked out in my favor.

I give Shard Squad 4 out of 5 stars.