-_-
it was fun for half a second
Reviews for "polarity"
Ikaruga it ain't quite, but almost.
The game's both a bit easy and a bit hard for having a huge ship relative to the bullets fire, easy in the volleys fired are a bit enough for the pro to dance through like a fly through a great doors of Notre Dame, yet too big for the rest of us to dodge through anything. The fact that bullets hit me despite not visibly touching the ship took a little getting used to (particularly on the far right and left sides of the ship, bullets just magically dissapear there and my health goes down), might want to work on hitboxing.
The polarity mechanic, while lifted, works well in this despite how it fails in every other attempt on Newgrounds, which I commend you for. As a previous reviewer said, you can just stands still and shoot while changing shields, but that was something you could do in ikaruga too, and required some skill.
Some more skill is needed in that tactic for this game, as I notice the more bullets flying, the harder it is to change polarity *exactly* when I want to,
The biggest feature I'd like to see implemented in future versions is Ikaruga's "bullet eater" concept: yes, we can absorb the hits, but what if we absorbed only one color for a long time: A giant lazer beam attack, getting 100% accuracy by simply absorbing bullets and firing the super attack.
Or perhaps some Gradius purchasing of powerups using the bullets absorbed?
Beautiful, beautiful looking game. Weak plot, but that's to be expected.
Bosses were weak and had no real variations, and it is sad to see a point in a boss battle where he's spitting red at me , and all I have to do is stay red and shoot him, and there's no blue because I killed the blue half. True difficulty would say that when i kill the blue boss, the red guy changes colors and fires both red and blue, or blue firing enemies spawn. Don't just make the end of the boss battle be too one sided.
All in all, a good way for someone who wants to get their Ikaruga itch scratched online.
ugur responds:
thanks for nice analysis, good observations and suggestions, i´ll work on those things :)
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All in all, a good way for someone who wants to get their Ikaruga itch scratched online.
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Thanks for this, if it achieves that for some i´m happy :)
Games okay.
But I'd rather play Ikaruga, which this game is heavily based off of, almost copied. Still, It was mildly fun.
Graphics
The graphics is great. But the game style is old... demon star, aero fighters, raiden...etc. But a 10 for the graphics.
A tight game, defeated by clunky controls.
Let's get the "Clunky controls" bit over with right away. The controls don't seem to like more than two similtanious commands (ie: shoot, left, up; or shoot, down, shift) If the player gives the game more than two commands it ignores all but one of them. This is frustrating since much of the gameplay is centred around multi-tasking. I like cursor based controls, but I reccomend against following previous suggestions to change the entire control scheme. That's too much work and might create new gameplay issues. Besides, the real problem here is not the chosen control scheme, but its execution changing the scheme may just leave us with a poorly executed cursor based control scheme, which wouldn't improve the game's playability. In a keyboard scheme however, you have to structure your commands so they won't lock up. This requires copious amounts of play-testing and abusing the controls.
The "shot polarity" feature has immasculated the poor bosses. All the player has to do is shift polarity to absorb their fire since the bosses only fire intricate vollies of red and blue fireballs. A player can defeat a boss by just standing and shooting. A quick solution might be accompanying bosses with standard fighters that continue to come in waves during the battle.
Graphics are amazng. I particularly apprieciate the full cut scenes, and complete flight animations, elements too-often ignored in flash shooters. The polarity feature doens't quite go far enough to stop this game from feeling like "another space shooter", so don't count on shooter haters being converted by this game.
We, the old gamers who like our space shooters can apprieciate this one. The best feature you have however is not the polarity-shifting thingy, but your stacking power-up scheme. Unlike so many other shooters ie: Terraburst of R-Type, Polarity maintains game balance by imposing harshlimits on power-ups, but allowing them to stack. So a player can't power up their ship to the point where it becomes an invincible engine of destruction, but if she judiciously collects power-ups, she can have brief shining moments of phenominal power and she gets multiple chances in a given level to play with combinations.
Ultimately the score I have to give this game makes me sad. There's such potential here, but it's sapped away by frustrating controls, and an appallingly low difficulty level (hint: the player appears to work for the richest military star-force ever. They have a seemingly inexhaustable supply of ships to waste on pilots who can't fly and shoot at the same time. You might want to up the score needed for an extra life, just a bit). The bones are good, the enemy AI seems well doone for a scrolling shooter, and the graphics are the best I've ever seen in flash, especially in shooter games.
PS: One final suggestion, since I'm sure you're capable of doing this. A feature I really love to see in shooters is angled shooting (ie: Alpha Bounty). Adding that feature to this particular game would give the player the option to snipe enemies of a certain polarity, and make it easier to fire around other enemies, making better use of that chain feature.
ugur responds:
About the controls:
Its sad about the input not handling 4 keys pressed at once, sadly there´s not much i can do about that i think. Its a general problem with flash and certain keyboards that when pressing certain keys together it doesn´t detect more than 3 inputs at once. I´m not sure if this has been solved in AS3/F10 layer export, but yeah, sadly i can´t do much about it in this AS2 game. You can customize the controls in the settings menu and see if it works better with your keyboard when you set it to different keys for the actions.
Regarding what you said on the bosses:
Well put, i´ll work on your suggestions.
On the rest of your post:
Yeah, you´re right, obviously people who like classic space shooters (and also ones heavily inspired by Ikaruga :) ) dig it and people who don´t like this type of game or just yell Ikaruga ripoff without giving it a propper try to see the differences will not like it anyway.
On the power up stacking: Yeah, i saw it like you but most people seemed to not like timing out powerups, so i changed that some now. Still not perfectly happy with how it is now, will think of something there :)
Also still balancing the difficulty forth and back :)
Angled shooting is a nice idea, will work on that :)
Overall:
Thanks a lot for your indepth review, not just praising or bashing it but nitpicking where its due, talking about the good sides too and giving great suggestions, really helpful and appreciated a lot :)