Cute and simple stuff.
Reviews for "Squid! Escape! Fight!"
i think it needs a tad bit more invincibility frames
cool game
Hi. I liked this game.
It's pretty fun, simple enough to pick up easily, and the artstyle is simple and charming. One of the parts I like the most that I least expected is the text at the top of the screen. Learning all the marine biology facts I never knew I needed was appealing in a way I can't quite describe.
The gameplay is also simple but engaging enough, and the core loop lasts a good bit before losing its appeal. Also I really love how robust the difficulty settings are. It made finding a pace of gameplay I was satisfied with really easy.
But all this won't stop me from indulging myself with this list of nitpicks/suggestions:
- The lives system was really annoying to me as someone who just wanted to spend a couple minutes playing and reading all the text. The game is not super hard, and can be made even easier with the difficulty options, but the few times I did lose were still rather frustrating. An option to remove these would be nice. I understand it would make the rewards at the end of some levels obselete, but even if that end screen were to be removed entirely it would still make for a better gameplay experience, to me at least. Also, simply having different ink tank additions and speed boosts instead of life boosts would be fine.
- Because the tutorial can be finished whenever, the instructions appear at the top of the screen, and the tutorial is part of the main gamemode, it's very easy to skip the tutorial without learning all necessary information, or even knowing you just skipped the tutorial. A tutorial where each instruction popped up in a separate prompt and you had to press a button to continue would minimize these issues. Maybe it would also help to make it seperate from the main gamemode so people would always know whenever they were playing the tutorial, and the tutuorial wouldn't waste any time for people who were just replaying the game.
- It's very easy to skip past some of the text that appears in certain levels by completing the level too fast. Because of this I would often get to the end of the level and just sit there for a while tapping up so I could see all of the text. A simple way to fix this is to just make the text continue at the end of level screen so anyone interested could keep reading and anyone not interested could just continue.
- Some music would be nice. This is more of a suggestion than a criticism, but even some very basic chill cords would add a lot to the experience in my opinion.
- The squid's dash in this game feels kind of weak. This is because the animation feels too basic and not smooth enough to convey any real force behind it, and there are no particle effects that occur when the dash happens. Even adding some very basic bubble particle effects to the end of the dash would go a long way in fixing this.
- There were a few minor spelling errors that I saw when playing the game. Don't remember all of them and where they popped up, but I recommend doing a full pass through again, since there are so few lines anyways.
- While it didn't bother me a huge amount, there are a few things that might make other people say the controls suck. The fact that the squid falls down slowly when not inputting a direction, but doesn't fall down when moving left or right, the fact that dashes to the side move diagonally instead of just left and right, and the fact that moving without dashing is rather slow.
- 1 control issue I did have is that I-frames after getting hit last barely any longer than the reeling animation, if at all, making it so that if you get knocked into another damage zone after taking damage, you just have to take the hit, which is especially frustrating in a game where 2 hits kills you, and a game that has a lives system. An easy way to fix this would be to simply add more I frames after getting hit, so the player has a second or so to remove themselves from any dangerous situation they find themselves in.
Alright that's it. Other than that stuff, cool game.
Omael responds:
Thanks a lot for your suggestion I'll try to tinker with the stuff you didn't like, all your suggestions are very articulated and i find them really useful.
I'm not a native speaker and i'm sorry for the mispelling, I'll need to find them and fix them.
The life system was a last minute addition and it felt right to add, I'll reevalute that.
Thanks for playing :)
very nice but I wish you could change controls. I keep accidentally going down and get hit. other than that I rate it 11/10!!!!!!!
Omael responds:
Thanks for playing. How would you like it the control