Reviews for SHMUP

[Lamia-Domina]

A pretty face with little substance.

Your graphics are slick. Really slick. And for that, you've gotten far more credit than you deserve.

Your gameplay design ranges from amateur to terrible. To begin with, expecting us to execute precision dodging with a ship this large and this slow is ridiculous. The hitbox is unreasonbly large, as well as being far wider than it is tall and there is a -reason- other games don't do it that way.

You frequently spawn massive waves of enemies so quickly that it is literally impossible to take them all out before they close, even with the most powerful weapons and best mods on the market. You frequently do this with enemies that you've programmed to steer to ram the player, and are as fast as or faster than the player's craft, so don't tell me we were supposed to mow through.

Your bosses (and to an extent, your game as a whole) are incredibly reliant on pattern memorization over good reactions. This in its own right is usually seen as a pretty lowbrow design decision, but you compound it by also making them so insanely lethal (even with max upgraded shields) that there is effectively no time to even identify their pattern - the level has to be played again and again just to figure out how to fight. The giant robot boss on Coeus was especially terrible about this.

RPG elements are a cool idea, but your execution has brought out nothing but the worst in them. I count only three weapons that have actual unique abilities, rather than just slight hikes in damage over others. I count one weapon with a special ability I found useful enough to take any notice of - the homing missiles, naturally. There is no actual strategy behind choosing your equipment besides figuring out which weapon has the best DPS and, debatably, which mods to equip - their effect is pretty minimal anyway, and in the end you take even that away with ultimate mods that buff every stat. Choosing equipment adds absolutely nothing to the game when there are no actual choices to make.

So kudos on the art, but next time could you maybe spend some more time designing an actually good game to back it up?

Afro-Ninja responds:

The large ship complaint keeps surfacing but nobody seemed to have an issue with it pre-release :/

thanks for the feedback

[matt-likes-swords]

Nice graphics and music, annoying gameplay

The difficulty is really cheap...

Your hit box is waaay too big.
The bullets are so small you can barely see them sometimes, and later on they move so fast you can't dodge them, unless you're not in their way to begin with.
Enemies pop out from the bottom of the screen without warning, and sometimes at lightning speeds.
Often my ship simply isn't fast enough to dodge some wide attacks.
After getting hit, your invulnerability should last longer. Foes shouldn't be able to hit combos on you.
The upgrade system was pretty cool, but maybe you should have left speed out of it.

I know you probably expect players to memorize the levels in order to dodge stuff, but flash gamers aren't serious enough for that.

More people would enjoy a game that looks harder than it is (tiny hit box, tons of bullets), than a game that's harder than it looks (this).

Anyway, good job on the graphics again, especially liked the backgrounds.

Afro-Ninja responds:

I'll definitely agree that I leaned toward pattern memorization, but it's hard for me to judge their difficulty since I designed them, and I didn't really have complaints in that department from early testers. Aside from the later levels, but I figured that was to be expected.

thanks for the feedback

[BHVampire]

...

VERY VERY AWESOME GAME... Very Great... Good Controls, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay and Weapons... Very awesome.... Good Job...

[Donatien]

Good game

But the ship is way too big.

[MMasterD]

Nice game!

That game is very goob. it reminds me Tyrian 2000 a little ( and i really love Tyrian)