Fun, but I found it to be very buggy. I kept glitching through things more than once, and got stuck outside the play area on one occasion. I also kept not getting rewarded my combo kills, meaning I could not enter rampage mode, despite kill large numbers of zombie. A fun game aside from those issues though, and not too many issues considering it's your first large entry on HTML5.
Reviews for "Rot"
Squize responds:
I made the mistake of increasing the player speed as it moved so slowly compared to the Unity version I'm working on now, and I guess that's what's allowing you to slip through the physics engine.
Thanks for pointing that out mate, I'll push an update tomorrow and revert back to the default speed.
I personally think this game is pretty damn fun. I don't get the haters here. Sharpnova, dude, you need to lighten up. You stress over the small stuff, you will die a lonely person. The only thing with this game is it seems to take forever to be able to level up to an effective state. Other than that small detail, the game is good.
Squize responds:
Thanks mate.
Balancing out the levelling up is always so tricky in every game, you never want the player to go more than a couple of rounds without something new to either get, or be in reach of getting, which means you either need to have tons of content which usually ends up with a lot filler, or decent things to unlock but then you can get everything fairly quickly so you have to spread it out more than you'd like ( Like I did :) )
Game was ok but its too repetitive.
The crystals were useless I wish I could use them to buy bonuses or that I could sell them for money.
After you get all outfits which is wayyy sooner than getting all weapons in the game.
The game felt like what is the point? I pass levels that are the same over and over and just buy new weapon or upgrades. It would be nice if there was an actual story.
Squize responds:
It was always meant as a horde shooter rather than a story / campaign based one, as being totally open about it, a decent length campaign takes a really long time to develop and the market for HTML5 games isn't what it used to be for Flash games.
Thanks for taking the time to play it and post feedback mate :)
Good game, gets boring soon
I must admit, I didn't come here with the intention of playing more than a five or so minutes, but in fact, I stayed for at least an hour. I actually like this one and I think I'll check out Rot Purge as well. Might be a lot of fun!
The good:
Solid visual design. Voxel graphics usually suggest that the developer looks for simplistic graphics which are easy to pull off. This does not always yield a satisfactory result as developers don't always know the difference between nice, simplistic visuals and simply lacking visuals.
Fortunately, in this case, it can clearly be seen that actual work went into making sure the game looks pleasing while also using simple graphical solutions. Both the ingame graphics and the menus are rather nice.
Fun gameplay. The controls are simple and easy to remember and the player character responds well to the player input and these things can easily make or break a game. The first day/tutorial level gives a nice taste of what to expect and the game just escalates things from then on at a relatively okay speed. After saving up some money and getting a shotgun, the first possibilities arise to get a taste of the rampage mode, which gives a nice flow to the levels as more and more zombies appear on each day. The challenges are okay, while the harder level choices are clever and fun. I do like that the player has the choice to do a normal day to day level or the modified level at the start of each day.
The bad:
The unlock system.
The game does not make it 100% clear how costume unlocks work. First, there is the coin collection system, (more on that later) and the shop. The game tells the player that the blue coins can be used to unlock costumes. To be honest, I did not reach the highest rank ingame as of the writing of this review, so there might be for purchase costumes later on that I do not know of yet. However, for a considerable portion of the game, costumes seem to be unlocked automatically when their rank requirements are met. This devalues the blue coins considerably, as they seem to be totally useless for quite a while. Weapon unlocks are totally okay on the other hand.
While I'm at it, I'd recommend an alternative to the unlock system; achievements as unlock conditions for unlockables, retro style. This is a much more fun way to go about unlocks IMO, as the dev is forced to come up with unique achievements and let's face it, achievement hunting, within the realm of actually doable achievements, is much more fun than endless grinding for a fixed amount of virtual currency.
The blue coins.
As far as I am aware, these things can be lost as a death penalty. Which, given the above point about them being effectively worthless for much of the game, is not the best way to go about such a feature. The rank system seems to work nicely and some form of an experience related death penalty would be much better in my opinion.
Back to the blue coins; my other problem with this system is that it reminds me (and I am probably not alone with this) of the dual currency systems used by many free-to-pay type games which plague the mobile gaming market. It is not a big deal here, as there is clearly no such scam in the game, but it does give off the impression that Rot Purge might include such shenanigans and that is not a good way to grow the potential player base.
Still, this might be just me being way too cynical for my own good. Take this as a word of advice, something to consider.
Conclusion:
Some things could do with some polishing and reworking, but all in all, Rot is a fun little game and I will definitely take a look at Rot Purge.
Squize responds:
This is why NG is my favourite portal, what an excellent review.
I've not touched any of the UI stuff yet in Rot Purge, partly because I hate coding it, and partly because I'm still not a 100% sure which direction I'm taking with it, and feedback like this helps a lot.
The "dual currency" was actually as you said ( You weren't being too cynical ;) ), I planned to have IAP in the game and it was going to be more focused for the Facebook / mobile crowd as I've never touched that part of gaming before and wanted to experiment with it.
I changed my mind as I didn't think I was in a position to offer good value content, and if you're just selling any old crap to make a dollar then you become like all the other companies out there and I really didn't want to go down that path.
The in-game shop is a really obvious throw back to that, I didn't remove it as some players like the choice of what to spend their coins on, but I very much doubt it'll make it's way to Rot Purge unless I can think of something cool to do with it ( Which I can't atm ).
Just to clarify, Rot Purge won't have any IAP. I wouldn't buy a game with IAP ( DLC is different ), and I wouldn't expect anyone else to.
Thanks again, and I do like the idea of achievements for outfit unlocking, I may steal that :)