Approximate amount of time to 100%: 30 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 8/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: Many, as it is a bullet heaven game
Is there a good guide available: You don't need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: For a few you need to play the higher levels, but most of them can be done on the first level of each season
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
Pesticide Not Required is an awesome Bullet Heaven game that does something different from many Bullet Heaven games. Instead of only (auto) attacking and killing many enemies, you can plant crops, catch fish, and mine ore. With farming and fishing, you'll earn experience to level up and unlock upgrades that change your stats. which allows for many different builds. With killing enemies and mining you'll earn money which will allow you to buy seeds to plant or buy new plots so you can have more plants growing at the same time. Each run has a maximum gameplay of 15 in-game days. During each run, you'll earn purple gems, which are used to buy skills in a meta-progression skill tree. They are also used to customize your home and to change the look of the animals which will help you during a run. Animals you say? Yes, there are animals that will help you with your tasks, like a dog who collects some loot for you, a cat who attacks the enemies, but also animals to help plant and water the crops.
PNR has a lot of awesome aspects. I love that it does things differently than most Bullet Heaven games. And I love the synarchy that is possible between the many skills. It also has a total of 21 characters which have different stats and make you play the game in a different way, and choose skills you otherwise might have ignored. It is a very addictive game, which I love in a roguelite. The feeling of getting sucked into a game and being surprised by how late it is when you look up is one of the best feelings a game can give you.
One of the downsides of Pesticide Not Required are some of the different weapons. This has a sidenote... most of them are fine if you turn on the setting "twin-stick" in the settings menu so you can aim yourself. But many of them feel weak when they just spawn in front of you, while the thing you do the most is run away from hoards of enemies. I wasn't a fan of Hay Bales, swords, or weapons like that. The ones I enjoyed the most were those that go around you, or shoot in a random direction because those had the biggest chance to kill the enemies that were swarming me from the back while I did run away. This meant that in most runs I would go for the same weapons every run if I got the chance to do that.
The achievements in PNR are a lot of fun. Most of them are very doable, but there are a few that are very challenging. I'm still struggling with killing a boss in 5 seconds, and others that were challenging are completing a run in Winter IV (the hardest difficulty), finishing a run without getting hit (and after that with the new character that got unlocked by that achievement). Win a run with only one weapon was also challenging, you need a strong starting weapon and then have to find weapon seeds for that one weapon. However, most of them you'll unlock with time if you change up with which character you're playing and play the different seasons. The developer told me that he has plans to add new achievements later on. I hope many of them are doable and less challenging than that 5-second boss killing one :P.
I give Pesticide Not Required 4,5 out of 5 stars.
4.5