It´s the best 2d fighter game I´ve ever seen.The only thing I´m concerned about is where the last key is, because I got the one in dungeons and the one dead vally.The reason I´m concerned is because even Google doesn´t know the answer.
Reviews for "DARK SWORD: The Light of Ainn"
This is a strong candidate for best of the month. It's nice to see a full-fledged game rather than just demos and game jam entries, etc. I definitely think goldenPiGames went too hard on this. There are plenty of normal enemies to fight, and even when there aren't the exploration and secret-hunting are still fun.
The main problem I had was that I got soft-locked out of finishing the game. When I defeated the heart of darkness, the game froze on the statue-crumbling screen and the statue didn't crumble. I assume something special was supposed to happen because it was the last statue and that's what crashed the game. I tried three times with different weapons and the same thing happened each time.
The other major bug I found is that you're able to run while holding the hammer if you switch from the ranged weapon to the hammer while you're already running. It's an exploitable bug of course so I'm reluctant to report it :)
MrDoth responds:
Thanks mate!!!!!!!!!!! The game is not made by goldenPiGames, but anyway thank you <3 :D
Literally the first thing I did in the game was click the "click here!" button. It didn't work right because you put "linktr.ee/mrdoth" instead of the full address "https://linktr.ee/mrdoth" so it was interpreted as a relative address. I'll admit that leaves an awfully bad first impression for the quality of your code.
The tutorial is lacking. It doesn't teach you basic things like blocking and doesn't provide any sort of repetition or reinforcement to make sure you understand important things like dashing.
The first boss is unremarkable. The idea of switching between melee and ranged weapons to mirror yours is interesting at least. But the extreme delay between attacks conflicts with the vibe I get that this is supposed to be a game where you attack while bosses are attacking. And the sword slam with all the projectiles is disproportionately hard to avoid compared to all his other attacks.
For a game supposedly focused on combat, it's devoid of regular enemies. Apart from the room of useless spiders in the dungeon. Regular enemies and minibosses are immensely underappreciated in the genre. They keep you on your toes, fill out otherwise empty areas, and let you get a feel for the systems and your weapons.
The dungeon's "platforming", if you can call it that, is awful due to the invariable length of your dash. Falling off puts you back to the beginning. Falling off multiple times consecutively due to the janky collision will result in you teleporting back multiple times.
Overall, this game gives off the strong impression of someone who did a bunch of things he thought was cool instead of thinking about why makes those things contribute to the experience. Dark Souls is cool, so you talk up the "brutal boss battles" and do that things with the area names but the areas are devoid of enemies, or, well, anything, I mean, if you're going to have the areas be so completely nothing, you might as toss out the overworld and make it menu-based instead. Limited color palettes are cool, so you made everything grey, black and red, but what they represent isn't consistent and you also have so many particle effects that visual clarity suffers. Screen shake isn't cool and I have no idea why you put it in and made it so excessive even for basic attacks. Teleporting back to the hub after finishing a dungeon or finding some secret is cool, but you made it automatic and unexplained instead of like putting in a teleporter for you to step into, so it's annoying if you want to continue exploring, and confusing regardless.
And, the last straw, it seems the game saved while I was in combat and two hit points down and had a line of bullets shooting at me, so since I can't beat this boss (the nito claw guy two to the north) I am actually softlocked.
Nice to see work continue on this game, but my review is mostly the same as it was before, albeit maybe a bit more positive.
I certainly do enjoy what the game is going for: the dark, brooding atmosphere is very mysterious and intriguing, the bosses are challenging and have all sorts of crazy patterns to contend with, combat is cool with a nice layer of strategy due to a back-and-forth between melee and ranged to manage energy, and so on. It's also got some nice touches like collectable lore and subtle effects like the way your character explodes when you're out of energy to help signal that you're out. it's basically a nice boss rush game, reminiscient of Titan Souls, Shadow of the Colossus or Furi!
However it still does feel rather clunky and unpolished. The hitboxes and the graphics for certain elements felt really awkward and inconsistent which led to a lot of confusion as to where objects actually are in space, making me take damage when I thought I shouldn't, or not being able to hit an enemy that my sword looks to be making contact with, and so on. It's important for a challenging game to be really airtight and polished with its controls and systems to feel like its fair, and this currently doesn't feel like that.
In the more minor aspects, I find the text very difficult to read as it looks to have lost a lot of definition from compression or something, and I also find it really awkward how you can control your character still during transitions or menus and so on when you shouldn't be able to: for example when I'm at the shop and clicking on buttons, I shouldn't be hearing my little guy swinging his sword around. There's also some weird bugs, AI glitches, sound balance is off, and so on.
I still think the game is rather fun and impressive and somewhat acceptable in its current state, but I can't help but want more from it. It's definitely getting there bit-by-bit and I'm looking forward to seeing the final version of this!
some bug in game