Weeeh! :3 I beat the nigthmare! :33
Reviews for "Fear Less!"
Cute art, but the gameplay is pretty boring/repetitive.
thumbs up
Nice graphics, nice audio, some fun details. Moment-to-moment gameplay is fairly smooth. Overall though, I find the lack of attention given to the game's design and mechanics to be a real hindrance to it feeling enjoyable.
This kind of game is already about repetition and failure and iterative improvement; adding an explicit upgrade system to that is fine. Random generation is a great way to add more variety to this kind of game.
Unfortunately your game seems more undermined by the upgrade system and random generation than it does improved. The random generation will often throw combinations of obstacles at you that *simply cannot* be avoided, which essentially means you are relying on luck to not get handed a set of obstacles that near-instantly depletes your health bar. The lack of a reasonable invulnerability timer means you can literally lose 3 hearts in the span of a single screen as a result of a single error, or even *no* error (in the case where the random generator really hates you).
The lack of attention also applies to the way some of the mechanics work, I'd argue. The way the hitbox works when jumping is very strange and the way being struck in midair near-instantly drops you to the ground can cause you to unfairly take damage from additional obstacles (which is part of what makes those 'impossible' setups a problem - you can't even choose to take one hit in midair to avoid two on the ground; you're going to take all three hits)
The sword mechanic is also kind of problematic - I feel that in some cases the way the timing is set up, you get only a few frames where you can actually hit the sword button and land in the red area, because the location where the targeting cursor appears (and its speed) doesn't seem to be tuned to always give you a fair shot to hit the target.
The medals popping up while playing is, I think, a mistake. It's distracting and the game already has a pretty low failure threshold thanks to the above design issues; actively distracting the player is not a great way to improve on this. (I understand why you have the medal obsession and medal popups here though, and you're hardly the only game dev to do it.)
I also agree with Porpentine's point that the game unfortunately falls into a pit where you spend the first few hundred meters of a playthrough bored, waiting to get to the part that is actually challenging. This is the downside to the way you built this game around using upgrades to brute-force your way through challenges; in practice the upgrades don't simply reduce the odds of failure and allow more extra chances, they literally let you ignore parts of the game, making it less interesting and less engaging. (The fox ears are probably the best example of this, but I also consider the triple jump to fall into this category.)
There's also some stuff going on here where mechanics are a bit hard to interact with on the first run through, but since taking damage isn't instant death, that's probably okay. The rabbits and fire pits are probably the only bad ones; neither of them look like things that will hurt you until you learn it.
Ultimately I feel like this game's problem is that actual player growth falls off very rapidly - after a few runs through, you understand the necessary timing to hop over obstacles and hit creatures with your sword. After that, you're literally just grinding away at it to get coins for upgrades, and trying not to get frustrated when the screen inexplicably fills with fireballs, rabbits and foxes.
It's not bad. But it could be a lot better. :(
innomin responds:
hmm... was your game lagging? A lot of what you mentioned seem to be classic symptoms (unfair sword, air hitbox, etc).
The only other explanation I can think of is that you didn't upgrade at all. A fully upgraded sword will not degrade as much over time (only about 15%). The upgrades are supposed to represent the girl 'fearing less' in mechanics, and the game was designed to become fairer with more upgrades. Obstacles are generated in spaced groups, and even though some later ones require double jump, all are beatable with skill (again, this could be a lag issue).
...most of this feels less 'review' and more 'attack'. I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but I don't think there's anything I can say except that we put a lot of work into this game, and phrases like "lack of attention" really sting. I fundamentally disagree with a lot of your points, and the way it was communicated didn't help either.
Really lovely game! I like the style, the music and the idea. Also the chance of upgrading brings something addicting to this game. 5/5