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. This changes your tears to a charge shot, where a fully charged eye will shoot off four tears in tight succession.

The binding of isaac rebirth items