Controls are kind of stiff.
Take the short jump for example: He boosts up like a rocket stops instantly and falls down again really fast. Id love to see that changed.
Visuals and music are great!
Reviews for "TentaCat: The Lost Lineage"
PKTORA responds:
Thanks for giving my demo a try! I'll try to refine the jumping.
Game has polish, but your stage difficulty is completely at odds with Seth's difficulty. He may only have 2 moves, but his health is way too large. If he's the boss to stage 1, then just give him the green part of his health bar, if not even less. Based on how your stage works, you seem to want to give players an easier version of Megaman, but having a boss that takes more shots than a normal Megaman boss is not the way to go about this. I did not feel like beating him after losing all of my lives to Seth and only Seth, only just reaching the yellow stage on my final attempt.
3 1/2 stars total, mostly for the stage and general design of the game.
Decent, reasonably polished platformer. I have to give props for adding a settings screen where you can change audio levels, graphics settings and controls. However, I do have some gripes with regards to under-the-hood stuff and game design...
* It didn't recognize my controller despite it using Xinput, which is a widely recognized standard.
* The prompts and labels did not change to accommodate my control settings. This can potentially be confusing, e.g. if the player forgot what a certain button was supposed to do. Dev should either use a generic label like "jump button" (which to his credit, he did do in some places), or create labels for every possible key that can be mapped and use the corresponding label for the mapped key instead of hard-coding them. This could easily be done by limiting the key set to A-Z, Space, Enter, Shift and a few other keys, to guarantee that the game won't glitch out, crash or throw an exception if the player sets a non-standard key (since setting a non-standard key would be disallowed; no volume-up to jump, TYVM).
* Skipping text does not work properly. When I press jump twice, I expect it to fill out the rest of the text box and go to the next line of dialogue. Instead, the text keeps going at the same pace, and then completely skips the next couple lines of dialogue after the first one finishes. This is broken.
* I disagree with having a lives system. There is no good reason in this day and age to implement that instead of just having infinite lives and being set back X amount by every death. Dark Souls, Ghosts n Goblins, and Jak and Daxter are some immediate examples that come to mind of games that do not have lives systems (or do, but losing X amount of lives just sets you back slightly more rather than to the beginning of the game as in GnG). I did intentionally get a game over to see what would happen, and to the Dev's credit, they've implemented a Mischief Makers-esque "Let's Continue!" screen, i.e. you can spend fish (points) to continue. I say get rid of the lives system altogether and use the "Let's Continue" screen on every death.
* I also disagree with having enemies respawn while still in the same room. Just...why? Doing this disincentivizes the player to kill enemies, because if they'll just respawn anyway, there's no real point in killing them. If they stayed dead at least until you left the room, you could at least clean the room and then go back and look for the special secret fish without having to be hassled by enemies. I do this in DOOM all the time when looking for secrets.
* Bosses take way too many hits. There's a difference between a genuinely challenging fight and a war of attrition where the boss can just wait you out until you screw up X amount of times. Especially when one tiny mistake or failure to read a telegraph can result in you getting combo'd to death because the boss is constantly on your ass and your jump arc isn't high enough to effectively deal with that. I think the bosses could be better-designed. I only beat sharky because I spammed the bullets so hard that the game glitched and he got locked into his idle animation, such that I cheesed him. I'm totally fine with this, cause that boss cheesed me several times before that. Also, spoilers, that's the end of the game's current content.
* Going further on the bosses, I think it's pretty weird that I have a Zelda-like "X amount of hearts" health system with i-frames (frames where the player is invincible just after taking a hit) while the boss has a Megaman-like health bar with no i-frames. Either give the player a health bar and beef up the enemies or design the bosses to have moments when they let their guard down and can be attacked, such that their health system can be consistent with the player's. One system instead of two.
I hope the dev sees this review and uses my criticism to improve it. The game has potential, (and it's unfinished, so there's lots of room to improve), which is why I'm voting for it in the Best of July 2019 Panel. I dunno if I'm supposed to keep that secret or something, they didn't say anything other than it's private, but "private" doesn't mean the same thing as "secret".
Anyways, good game. You should sell it on steam when you eventually finish it.
PKTORA responds:
Thanks for the feedback! I'll be making some of these adjustments as soon as I can. Once the game has been completed it will be on steam.
I accidentally skipped the introduction because I thought I had to press a button to progress, some text that says "[Z] skip" should fix that.
While the game is okay it doesn't do anything new besides its quirky-looking main character, and it could really use some satisfying visual feedback. Enemies and especially bosses take way too many hits which makes you want to rush past them, which for most enemies is the only reason they form a threat as you can easily keep your distance and shoot them.
I did like how the level select screen starts with you entering in a boat, it makes the world feel much more real.
PKTORA responds:
I'll be making tweaks to fix the dialogue box. I've just updated the game to reduce the boss difficulty.
What are the controls