I was able to play through the demo a few times the other day.
Ark wrote:You have a beautiful presentation going for this game.
The presentation is indeed beautiful and bulges with detail. The immaculate menu and GUI design matches, though must use the mouse, not WASD to navigate GUI in current build. Sound design is pretty good too, though overall program volume could be a touch louder imo.
I found some important in-game elements do occasionally get lost with the Red→Black pallet limit. Bullets do a pretty good job standing out being black with a saturated red moving ring around them, but I think I would put that same red outline around enemies that move down vertically and threaten to collide with the player, like the skulls, worm-leaches, and the charging octopus dudes. They could be difficult to see, becoming especially obscured against the black edges of the screen. Enemies that stay in formation up top aren’t a collision hazard, so their appearance is good as is.
There’s a noticeable amount of momentum slide with the movement controls that I am not fond of. The movement controls feel sloppy when the character continues to travel after the controller is moved to neutral (This issue was present with all of the characters I tried). I think that there should be less or no distance traveled after the player ‘lets go’ of the controls (imo as an stg player). Offering more precise controls can allow you to balance your game toward a faster/more intense experience with a higher skill ceiling and better micrododging. I ended up trying to counter the sliding after moving by immediately performing a brief opposite direction input to negate some momentum and stop more abruptly on the spot. I was not able to get any sort of built-in controller support working anywhere in the game with my setup and resorted to using a
joystick keymapper similar to
Joy2Key to use my arcade stick.
I found axe-throwing characters to have the highest DPS and top killing power. The 3-way shot characters were good for quickly killing formations and dealing with skull zako, but had painfully low shot DPS of ~1-2 HP and was not shield-piercing like the axe making large enemies and bosses 3x+ slower kills. My most desired upgrades were the 1-bounce-use wave shield and the 4-bounce for rapid shot ability.
The game seems to have a good deal of items and meta that I am not sure how they affect gameplay. The game in general feels like it has a lot of mechanics going on at once with only so much the player can devote their attention to at a time. I recognize this may be somewhat by intent. I understand that a lot is still to be done. End boss seems cool too, but has minimal scripting after opening attacks.
I was able to get
this (unity) game demo working in Linux under Wine. I needed a 64bit Wine prefix with d3dx11 b/c my system does not have Vulkin. Users with Vulkin
could potentially use DXVK for better performance, idk. I don't think my legacy system was achieving unbroken 60 frames, but the game generally appeared to run smooth with some slight choppiness when large waves appear onscreen.
Also, the game softlocks after defeating the end boss if you get the dog event (after the boss) & pet dog: GUI breaks and can’t take bone. Funny.
Game looks fantastic so far, but there’s some polish to do.
