Reviews for The Rise of a Knight

[S-K]

bonkers collision detection and attack glitch?

Something about the guard's design just didn't fit in with th rest of the game although I can't put my finger on what exactly. The most serious flaw of the game however is the nuts collision detection of attacks, it treats weapons as part of your body meaning something like a spike touching your sword with hurt you, which is especially annoying when you have a spike wall behind you and an enemy in front of you and you have that sword swinging around trying to defend yourself.

Further into this point I found in most situations it's actually better to attack backwards! (face away from the enemy and attack) because you can do damage to enemies on every frame of an attack animation, this not only means you can usually attack faster but in some situations can do 3 HITS with one hard attack (try it on the first boss and see for yourself) If the backwards attacks thing was intended consider this a 7/10, but either way the combat needs some more fine tweaking.

SeethingSwarm responds:

The backwards attack was intended. Think about it. In real life, if a guy would swing a very sharp object form behind him to his front, if you would stand behind him and the sharp object would scrape over your face, you would not be left without any scars :)

Then there is the hit detection with the traps. Yeah, I know, its flawed, and I have learned form making this game how to prevent it in future game projects. Thanks a lot for the review and the constructive feedback :)

[SuperDrops]

No Masterpiece

This game showed that some effort went into it, but not enough to raise above the masses. It was nice for what it was, a hack'n'slayer with some storyline to move things along, but there were some botherments. For example the guards attack range. I could slash stuff that was a good foot away from meeting with my swords point, whats up with that? Also the light attack animation was not good. The way he was doing it would have probably popped his shoulder joint. I liked the heavy strike though. The ending was not all that bad as well, although it openly screams "SEQUEL!" all the way. One thing I think you should improve were the bosses. The only one that was slightly challenging was the spider, the others were way to easy, compared to the difficulty of the levels.

SeethingSwarm responds:

Very good points you make. Yeah, there's a sequel under construction, and Im trying to work on all the shortcomings of this game and improve upon it for the sequel. Thanks for the review!

[Hollowsong]

Great feeling, bad execution.

For initial criticism, I have to say that too much of the game involved running. I swear, there was a 15 minute long run with only three monsters (slight exaggeration, but you get the point).

The intro idea was great. I'd go as far to say it was a perfect concept. It just took too long. I just watched tv while holding down the right arrow key until I got to something interesting.

One thing that stands out is that the special attack bar refills too quickly. When you use it, it's practically at 25% already from the one monster you just killed with it. Also, the quick-attack is far more powerful than the "strong" attack. Since the enemy has poor hit-recovery, it's just too easy to spam A (holding it down, even) putting the target effectively in a stun-lock.

On a more major issue: when trying to jump over arrows or axes thrown at you, it would never work properly. The projectile would go underneath me, but suddenly it skipped to an animation of me being hit. Terrible collision detection.

For a melee-combat side scroller, having to hold down the arrow key was annoying. It should've been more like the old arcade versions of Simpsons, Ninja Turtles, Xmen, Gauntlet, etc where you move a bit, get attacked, move on, etc.

More customization content needed to be added to the game. It's very, very easy to include item drops, different weapons, and/or a skill system with the foundation that you have in the game so far. Why do you think World of Warcraft is so popular? It's because you get a sense of instant gratification when gaining levels, experience, or points. In any event, some instance of this would be nice in this type of game.

SeethingSwarm responds:

Great review, thanks!
I agree with all your points and will try to improve on the flaws and include some new elements into the sequel for this game. The foundation is set, and I can build on it and try to fix some annoying bugs like the flaw with jumping and the terrible hit detection...

[ThePhantomSlasher]

Great Potential

If you fix the hit detection maybe make the attacking more smooth it will make the game a lot better. Maybe give it a RPG aspect with equipment or the such to be honest I did not finish the first level this time I've done it before but it did not hold my interest enough to do it again heh but try tweaking the plot making the baddies more various more interactive battle I don't know but I like this as a starting point.

SeethingSwarm responds:

You've got some good advice and I will take it :)
This game was meant to be quite a simple hack 'n slash game where my focus was primarily the atmosphere. Fixing the hit detection for this game will be like making it from scratch all over again, so I've decided to make a sequel instead with as much improvements as I can possibly do at the moment plus many new and exciting stuff. Its already well underway. Thanks for the review!

P.S.
Although its quite sad that you didnt get very far in this game to see the twists in the plot, you wont have to either, because in the sequel there will be a "story so far" section so you can find out exactly what happened in The Rise of a Knight.

[pkrock]

Easy

the game wasn't bad but I was just able to hold a and forward for the most part

SeethingSwarm responds:

Yeah I know :) Combat has been a big struggle for me in games to get the balance right so that its not too hard and not too easy. In this case most people have complained that it's just way too easy. I think I have improved a tad bit with this game's sequel, The Rise of a KING.