I enjoy short games like this one. It could be more sophisticated, but it was still interesting. Concept of Eli's attack is good, but some beats are easy to play and some are somewhat confusing I guess. They also doesn't fit the music that's played, so it could mislead some people. I don't know if enemies should miss that often though - it made game literally a cake walk.
https://youtu.be/jsRXiy7R20o
Reviews for "[BURNOUTS]:Tower Of Power"
FCPXAV responds:
Thanks so much for the video recap, that's super helpful to look through!
I made this version a easier than the last as people kept complaining about the difficulty, especially as Jolyne. Still trying to find a middle ground haha
Hmm, interesting little game that gives me a bit of a mixed impression!
On the plus side, it seems like a rather charming game that is going for those quirky Earthbound-esque RPG vibes, what with its funny dialogue and characters, modern day themeing/aesthetic, and turn-based combat with QTE minigames. It mostly pulls this off quite well, such as with funny dialogue that is delivered with effective pauses for emphasis, by keeping the combat QTEs short as to not disrupt the flow too greatly, and my favorite part of the game was when it seemed like it was going for interesting 'puzzle' fights, such as the beer pong boss fight which needs to be defeated with the shoot move as it is invincible otherwise. I feel like there's a lot of potential here!
However, there were a lot of complications that brought it down for me:
For one, the general feel of the game felt very janky. No, it never bugged out of me fully, but there were a lot of minor things that just made it feel like it wasn't smoothly put together. For example, there is a strange, subtle delay when you try to navigate through menu options rapidly: if you're fast enough, it can end up ignoring your inputs, so it felt like I was forced to move through options slowly as not to break it. There were also awkward things like how moving to the equipment menu from the main menu has it laggily close and re-open a whole new window for some reason, and in combat you can have prompts come up for a brief second after you've already moved past them, like if you interrupt the enemy's prompt to do your attack, it'll go back to play the rest of the prompt out despite you already moving on. Nothing crazy, but it just is slightly annoying to deal with all these minor hiccups, like having a pebble in your shoe.
In a similar vein to above, the music minigame for Eli felt misaligned: if you try to hit the arrows to the actual beat of the music, it won't work because it is slightly desynced. Instead, you need to intentionally not follow the beat and just hit the notes according to the visuals, which just felt bad. In addition to this, feedback for hitting notes felt a bit confusing: yes, the overall feedback for the end result of the game was clear, but I'd like a combo count or affirmation for each note I'm hitting during to check my timing.
I found the font that the game uses to be a bit too fancy, garish and bold to make it rather difficult and annoying to read, and I would much prefer a more simple and clearer font, at least when it comes to dialogue: you can keep the stylish font for things like actions and titles and names, if you must.
I felt like combat was lacking a certain level of pizazz or juice. So many attacks play out with no special effects or animations and it really makes it boring: for example, practically all of the enemy attacks just have the enemy grow large and shrink. I feel like it would be much better to have special effects to distinguish attacks from one another and give it more character: for example, there should be things like a big music note explosion when Eli does his attack, a lighting bolt for Jolyne's spark skill, and when the philosopher quotes Kant as you, you should be assaulted by a bunch of word balloons and the sound of 'blah blah blah'. You put special effects for the death explosions, so just make more like that for everything else!
There was also some confusing inconsistency in the game, like how Eli's Fury Fists doesn't have a minigame for it, yet Jolyne's spark does, and I have no idea why the Superego boss fight gets a special QTE to defend from its attacks while every other enemy doesn't.
Finally, above all the rest, my biggest complaint is that a lot of the fights were pretty brainless and repetitive, boiling down to simple attack spam with the occasional heal. The game got me really excited when it introduced the special beer pong enemy shoot puzzle and the hint that you can interrupt enemies when they change color with a firebomb, and I thought, especially since the game is so fight-centric, that the rest of the fights would get even more creative and puzzle-like, kind of like figuring out to pray at the end of Earthbound. Unfortunately, the beer pong enemy was the only one of that nature, and firebombing the bosses that do change color didn't seem to have any significant effect as they still pull off their healing move. It was really disappointing: I wish more bosses required special strategies to get at their weaknesses, or even puzzles like maybe only being able to defeat the philosopher boss by talking to him and picking the right answer to confuse him like using the special talk action in Fear & Hunger.
Hopefully you don't take this too badly since, as much as I complain, I only do it because I think this does have a lot of potential, so best of luck on further development!
FCPXAV responds:
Thanks for the detailed review!
A lot of the jank things like some Eli music being misaligned are due to this being a PC game adapted to WebGL, so there are a few problems I'm still working on fixing :(
I like the idea of special effects on attacks! It's something I want to implement way down the line, but right now the project is just me doing everything and I'm not great with art so I can only do so much visually while still making the music/art etc haha. The fire effect halves healing and I do want to add more element-based things and more dynamic gameplay, it's just going to take me a while and this was more testing the waters and measuring progress. Glad you enjoyed and hope you like the other things to come!
was the battle music inspired by "SLEEPY HEAD" by the pillows, because it really reminds me of it!
FCPXAV responds:
It was actually! A lot of the music i've been making for the game is Pillows/FLCL inspired!
Nice
So this was an interesting game here the controls are tricky at first Glad I found this fun game submission here its one of those kinds of games that are unique and different I want to first say thanks for taking the time to make game stuff here and like this, The art is fresh the fetautures are nice lots of different systems on this game You do have the skills and it shows infact there is not much that is lacking, Almost like a point and click but mixed with different game types and systems
~X~
funi earthbound rythm game