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Rack and Slay (Demo)

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The rogue-like dungeon crawler where you're a billiard ball! Push monster balls into holes or traps in randomly generated levels. Draft from a large variety of 100+ items with stackable, game-changing effects. Find combos to build your own synergies and customize your playstyle. Rack and Slay!


Wishlist the full version on Steam!


https://tempupload.ngfiles.com/1151000/iu_1151498_9249720.webp


https://tempupload.ngfiles.com/1151000/iu_1151497_9249720.webp


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Oof, this needs far more work.

- This demo is laggy as hell.
- The screen size is far too large.
- The target aiming does not follow the mouse cursor or clicking point.
- selecting a skill or item or whatever it was at start did not work at all. Luckyly I could start the level in bottom right corner. If I were not to collect anything before start, the cards should at least be greyed out.

The concept, however, is good. Looking forward for a more polished demo that I can actually test.

Graeme responds:

Some of the issues you had would likely be absent in the Steam demo!
It'd be slightly more up-to-date, and is the intended experience. Hopefully that experience is closer to what you we're expecting!

Pretty neato game! Overall the general construction and presentation feels high-quality and polished, everything felt very intuitive due to an excellent interface with loads of guides and tooltips, and the concept of a roguelike dungeon crawler being combined with billiards is quite the interesting combination! I found myself easily getting addicted and having a lot of fun.

If I was to have any feedback:

*At first I thought that the game might be a bit too easy with the targetting guide being present as default, but when you combine it with enemies that can blind you and it only giving you direction and not power and all the other effects, it feels like a nice decision overall. Still, something to consider as to whether that should maybe be part of a difficulty, or relegated to a power-up, or so on.

*I found myself really getting into the gameplay rhythm to the point where I would easily lose track of how many shots I had left. Therefore, it'd be really nice if there was some sort of warning when you're on your last shot, or maybe even a brief center-screen flash of how many balls you have left before each shot.

*While the gameplay does continue to technically evolve with more items and obstacles as you get deeper, it didn't always quite feel that way: instead it felt like I was just playing the same level over and over just with more trash cluttering the board. Certain obstacles like stoppers and boost pads didn't look like they were physically part of the board, looking detached and more like power-ups. Basically, just not sure about the long-term appeal if it's already starting to feel a bit repetitive with such plain and randomly-constructed boards. Maybe get a bit more pinball in your construction, in how they are more bespoke and make everything so flashy with all sorts of unique events and graphical themes?

*There are also certain events that I wish had a bit more pizazz to them. For example, when there are enemies left over at the end, it's super boring to just have 'X damage' pop-up and everything fade away: it'd be great and more intuitive if there was an animation where the enemies would physically ram into the player, either one-by-one or perhaps just all jump on him in a big dust-cloud tussle, and then bounce away. It'd deliver the information of why you took damage much better.

On three of my browsers (brave, firefox and safari) I occasionally get an error after finishing a level, which especially sucks when you've just reached the final level...

what?

Good idea, but execution is a bit off. I really don't enjoy having to shrink my screen below 50% to see the entire field.

Graeme responds:

This is primarily a trade-off of offering a browsed-ready demo of the game. When playing the full game, with a proper suite of resolution options, this shouldn't be an issue!

Credits & Info

Views
7,664
Faves:
23
Votes
146
Score
3.91 / 5.00

Uploaded
Jan 24, 2024
2:15 PM EST