This is so well made and everything flows so nicely together!! you guys seriously rock!
Reviews for "Bundle Beeline"
very well made
ITS AMAZING
fuck that robot guy
Oh jeez, this was a really rough one for me! I really want to like this game as I find it incredibly charming and wonderful from a presentation perspective: almost every single element of the game, even the boring stuff that most devs don't pay attention to like menus and score results and such, is very elegantly polished and brimming with so much life! I also love package delivery games like this when they incorporate skillful platforming and throwing as a risk/reward, so it should've been a match made in heaven!
But good god, despite how great the game looks, I could not stand how it actually played! Through a combination of a camera that is too zoomed in which makes it feel so cramped and difficult to see ahead, general movement that feels so awkward and slippery due to strange momentum physics, incredibly annoying enemies that feel way too powerful/unfair and too tedious to work around, illogical and inconsistent throwing controls that put the package down when I want to throw it and throw it when I want to put it down despite my best efforts...all this and so much more made every movement I tried to make felt so taxing and stressful to deal with.
Even if I were to disregard the various minutiae of the movement mechanics, the game as a whole also felt quite shallow. The map is so tiny and you only have 3 destinations, so it only takes a few packages before you get the gist of everything and it just feels so repetitive to keep running the same routes over and over. I found it very stressful that the game didn't pause to allow me to read the recipient's reactions, instead pushing me to keep delivering despite them talking it out: would much prefer if it would pause and allow me the choice of whether to read or skip the dialogue. Finally, it didn't feel like there was a time limit or a target goal to hit either, so the game just felt pointless: even if you're great and go for a big high score, without a goal to hit, the game inevitably ends only when you run out of patience and get a game over of your character wallowing in failure despite your efforts.
As a side note, I had no idea you could throw packages at enemies to damage them. I think I never realized I could do this through a combination of 1) tutorial never explaining it as an option 2) aforementioned difficulty in throwing controls 3) game is very cute in general so why would I hurt a cute little animal 4) why would I risk damaging the package, especially when hitting an enemy doesn't seem to prevent damage as a potential bonus.
I definitely applaud the team on this for some wonderful polished visuals and such, but unfortunately in my case it felt like a style over substance thing where maybe more effort should've been put into more interesting and varied content alongside smoother gameplay mechanics.
squidly responds:
I think you need to realize this was done in 3 days, man. Getting it all together was a miracle in itself.