baller
Reviews for "Rogueblast"
Fun! Little strategy guide: pick up a bow at your earliest convenience, the monsters hit fast and hard and range is your best defense.
Very fun Gameplay
I can play it on a phone o:
Interesting little hacky-slashy game! It's pretty fun and addictive in how fast-paced and simplistic the general gameplay (combat and looting) is, but unfortunately it feels rather shallow and short-lived: once you've played one level of it you've pretty much seen everything.
As said, there definitely is a lot of potential here: while it is rather simple, that very same simplicity allows the game to never slow down and just keep you moving forward, and the game does attempt to vary things up with certain special events like scrolling rooms, hidden tunnels, and all sorts of equipment. There's a certain smoothness to everything as well: movement/animation feels very slick and the combat feedback is decently satisfying. And the music is a jam as well, to top it all off.
However, as said before, the game gets old quite fast and just ends up feeling repetitive. There's just an overall lack of feeling like you're actually progressing in a meaningful way, which should be the core conceit of these kind of games. Yes, the colors may change, but I was disappointed to see the same enemy types just get recycled over and over with higher stats, the same bosses with the same patterns, the same weapons and trinkets, the same rooms, and so on, with nothing new being introduced. The numbers may technically be moving behind the scenes, but nothing is changing since they all move in tandem: it's meaningless. Compared to something like Risk of Rain or Isaac, the equipment we get doesn't stack to create fun combinations, but instead just constantly gets replaced, keeping us static. It especially doesn't matter anyway since everything is just boring stat increases instead of fun abilities that would change your playstyle significantly.
In addition to that, there are some minor things that get in the way. The stat menu is very boring to look at since its just a bunch of text: it's practically a debug console instead of something the player should see, where's the nice equipment inventory tiles that you can mouse over for info and such? If an item drops at the edge of the screen, you can't even read what its tooltip says because it bleeds over the edge. Those same descriptions can be confusing too: a cape says it gives you +atk spd and its a trinket, but a claw says it gives you +atk spd but its a weapon when I thought it was a trinket. Speaking of trinkets, if I have two slots, why can't I pick which trinket gets replaced when I pick it up somehow? Finally there's just a lot of confusion where enemies can suddenly do more damage than you think they would, there's so many acronyms and shortened text that makes it hard to decipher, and so on. Balance is also a bit of a mess with weapons like the staff being just too useful.
Definitely feel like it could be something fun with more polish, balance and content, however! The core seen here is quite decent and ripe for expansion.
ErikSwahn responds:
Glad for your response on the game! Currently it is not meant to be super deep and I think renaming it to "Rogueblast Prototype" could be more fitting. I have uploaded a project file so people can edit my game in Construct 2, which lets people use this idea to expand it more. I am glad to hear about the critique though as it helps me with upcoming games :)
The project file can be found on my patreon page for free!