My son and I had this stuck in our heads for a long time: that sacred survivor-like moment where you max out a weapon and it suddenly turns into something else.

They're in the game now: 10 evolutions, each a fusion of two weapons. The rule we set ourselves is that every weapon is used exactly once, so no evolution is "free" — to unlock one you have to max out both its parents. When that golden card finally shows up in the level-up, you know you earned it.

The balance nearly gave me a heart attack. Once they were working, my son started testing them the way only a kid tests — hunting for the broken one. He found it in five minutes. I sat down and measured what each one actually deals against the boss (8000 health): SOLAR FLARE took 6 to 8 MINUTES to kill it; HIVE MIND melted it in 6 SECONDS. The same batch of weapons, a 70x gap between the weakest and the nastiest. We rewrote them all.

A couple that have us hooked: PRISM ARRAY fires a fan of colored shards that ricochet off the walls (the bouncing was my son's idea). And MAELSTROM is an endless spiral of bullets in the color of your ship — you become a galaxy of projectiles. There are eight more.

We've had a blast making these. Try them and tell us which one drives you wild — and which you think is still broken, because we've definitely missed one.

See you in the rift.