Reviews for Words are Weapons

[bixnood007]

This game is an ergonomic nightmare. I believe that lefties deserve love, but don't forget that the majority of people are right handed. Why isn't there a right handed keyboard arrangement? Also, why isn't the left handed keyboard arrangement A,S,D,F; you know the keys people have learned since grade school to naturally rest their left hands fingers on?

The flow of symbols also creates some rather painful maneuvers for your hand. Like when you have to press down with your pinky in conjunction with your middle finger. Unless you are well practiced in moving your hands in strange ways that is a painful action for your non dominate hand to perform at high speed. Also symbols don't seem to follow any rime or reason to their pattern like in most rhythm games. You have no songs playing, no beat, or even a clear flow to the sequence. Just random shit flying past you to quickly.

The fights themselves don't have any witty banter or any kind of clear cut signs of a "showdown" happening. It's just two awkwardly modeled sprites holding microphones as the symbols move through each participants respective box. With the way the HP system is set up the PC shouldn't be going second, but first. That way you would have a solid understanding of just how accurate you have to get the sequence to win and if you are close to losing. With the enemy going second it just feels like bullshit whenever you lose, because the computer naturally gets the sequence down nearly perfectly every time. Essentially, you are losing any potential for excitement and tension in lieu of frustrating bullshit. Which also hurts the pacing of the game because you could have the player loosing much quicker, and restarting the match again still excited over a near victory.

It would also be nice to have a meter rising from hits rather than falling from loses, and you could be trying to reach a potential cap for the victory while the NPC is "rapping" at the same time. Just anything to produce a sense of competition rather than just the need to hit every symbol perfectly in a ergonomically painful DDR rip off.

I like the art direction and idea behind this game, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

suVrik responds:

Hi, bixnood007. Thank you very much for your response!
I took this controls (Z X C V) from another guitar-hero-like game, but I'm not lefty too, so I added alternative controls (M , . /) for righties. It was described in the description. You don't have to read a description when you play games, so it's probably my fault that this wasn't written somewhere in game.
We made absolutely another battle-system in the first 2 days of the development, but it didn't work correctly (much worse than this battle-system). So in the next 2 days we made the whole game you can see now. I tried, but it was too hard for me to make it REAL rhythm-game in this short amount of time. There're many mistakes we made (you wrote about most of them) but the only reason why we didn't fix them was time.
Responses like yours and ones below are lessons for me. I would like to see your responses under my games in the future.