Controls are tricky and complicating, but well designed.
Reviews for "Sanguine 2"
i can't find hints to uncover the masterios word ..............so what i doing now? do you help me
5 stars, but I docked you a half star because the controls are really finicky. I love the old NES feel this has. Very difficult game play, but not so much that it discourages you from playing. Graphics are pretty cool but the music is top-notch. I also docked half a star because of the crappy SFX when you grab a person. Come on man.... you put all that effort into the music to have shitty SFX? I dunno, maybe that was the intent.
I have a few questions. What is the purpose of the little glowing orb that drops when you swing the upgraded blade? And what is the purpose of the "ghost orb stance" when you hold shift and up? I didn't see what it was supposed to do.
RayBeckham responds:
You get souls from killing people with the scythe. Or do you mean the little purple burny flames that burn on the ground? Just for fun.
Every time you press the special key you do a random little animation. It's just for fun too.
Great game!
Some stuff:
Enemies should not shoot me when they can no longer see me.
movement precision could have been better.
The way you have chosen to punish the player for deaths is bad. I have no intention of climbing the walls over and over again.
RayBeckham responds:
The thought process with human behavior is that you don't want to be seen, period. If a guy sees you, jump, flip, and get over his shots and grab or attack him! I don't want the player to have to sit back and reset an encounter over and over, I want them to advance in the game and be more aggressive once they've been seen.
And it's hard. You get shot up pretty fast, which gives you more incentive to be careful and cautious against your own instinct to go as fast as possible. To me, this is just a very human nature that also embodies my game character.
But if they just shoot into walls and can't hit you, then you still have to either get far enough away to reset them or you still have to jump through the bullet storm. If they forget you exist, then any time there's a wall or a floor or section of terrain, they'll constantly be forgetting you exist as you move around and that seems really silly. It also would cause enemies to stop at different times and it could cause them to become synchronized in such a way that they are impossible to get past without doing a hard reset.
To keep it simple, it is the way it is. Don't get caught, and if you do, it takes some really good maneuvering to get through multiple guys shooting at you. Or you can run away but that takes more time and isn't as thrilling.
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There are big skulls hidden in the game that produce infinite souls that you can use to quickly recharge back to 10 lives. They are always in secret levels "hidden in plain sight" on the overworld map and are also sometimes hidden in the regular levels as well. Scythes also generate souls when you kill humans with them.
I wondered if I should give the player back all their lives when they recover from death or not, but I thought this would make exploring and interacting more interesting. It also discourages players from simply dying at 1 soul/life left just to get back to 10 faster. The trade off is, some people may not discover or be aware of the infinite soul spawners. And that's why I have the little critter on the map who seems to disappear into the little woods location, to try and show players that there are inconspicuous levels out there.
I could just do the safe route and hold the players hand and ensure that 1 out of every 100 people don't have this problem, but I think it would make the game less interesting. It's just my opinion, but since it's my game that's the choice I went with.
Despite all the reviews i thoroughly enjoyed the game a very nice reminded of the slow animations of castlevania, at least the classic ones. Whether the slow animations were intended or not i have no clue, but still managed to get about each level. the only real problem i had is the air attack which is fine but half way through it stops the millasecond you hit the ground, that can be fixed and u should let it go through for the effort that one has to put in to line up that kind of movement and attack to land. Either way my only complaint, great game great music and a very sound color pallet ;D