Score: 6
"Pretty good. It shows you spent time on this."
date: April 5, 2008
From a gameplay standpoint, it takes way too long to kill grunts as well as bosses. This feels like it could be a really solid platform shooter if you tweaked some things here and there. A few suggestions:
- Both guns aren't very strong. I'd recommend either halving enemy health or putting in a weapons upgrade system in a later version of the game. A lot of the bosses can be killed by just standing in the right spot and blasting them, but it takes forever because the guns are so weak. Which leads me to my next gripe:
- Bosses are a bit of a chore. Please consider cutting their health down. It doesn't really add to the difficulty for them to have that much health. If you wanted to give the player's a challenge, you could try changing up their attack patterns. A lot of the enemies/bosses seem to just run at the player and occasionally melee attack. Mix it up a little.
Some of them are also kind of unfair in their attacks. For instance the floating robots two arm guns fire too fast to really be dodgeable. A player can jump over the first one but the landing is too slow to dodge the second one. The robot's second attack with the afterburners is also kind of cheap. Not in the attack itself but in two problems that arise because of it.
1.) The space between the burners is too small to maneuver safely. It's easy to run with him when he's going to the side but once he starts heading in the opposite direction it's far too easy to get stuck inside a flame.
2.) It would be helpful if the robot had some kind of "tell" as to when he was going to do his afterburner attack. For the duration of the fight I found myself just sitting under his head just in case. The player has two choices in this fight: Cage himself under the robot's head just in case he does that attack or get fried. Anything from some glowing eyes to beeping before he does the attack would help tremendously.
Ok, so that's my two cents. All in all a fun game that could really be a solid shooter if you reworked a few things here and there. Also, as someone else mentioned the game could use some bugtesting to help hammer out a few problem areas. Keep at it though. You're really doing a good job.