Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Aesthetically one of the better entries.  Hack Attack immediately grabs the players' attention with a jaunty chiptune loop and a choice of four bouncy geeks to play.    The character choice is cosmetic and the music never, ever ends, but game is pretty fun and quite technically solid, a well-scoped 7DRL that even features unique attack sounds for all the actors to complement the nice graphics.  It all creates an excellent atmosphere to fish in the player.
  

  The gameplay model is strikingly fair.   No healing but, provided you are paying attention and carefully plan your moves, it's unlikely you will take any damage (though this gets increasingly hard to do the further down you go).  This makes the choices very meaningful.    But its unique gimmick, the building of macros of three moves, didn't really fish me in.  I had a hard time finding times in which it would be applicable, and I sort of feel like it could use a bit more variation than "move" and "attack."

  Overall, a very solid experience for the time in which it was created, which makes it a pretty good 7DRL in my assessment.

  • Completeness - 4 (No music toggle that I could find, in-game help display, or persistence.  However, other than that it's a pretty complete project.)
  • Aethetics - 4 (Better than average, no mind blowing animations but excellently stylized assets that features interpolated movement on bouncy sprites.  Even if it does get repetitive, that music is pretty good!)
  • Fun - 4 (Very solid and fair, gives the player reason to think.  The macro building that replaces the progression didn't really fish me in, but the predictability of the varied enemies makes strategies naturally intuitive and play out well.  Later levels are a bit overkill in difficulty.)
  • Innovative - 3 (The hacking is a neat twist, but maybe not a great replacement for proper RPG mechanics.)
  • Scope - 3 (Very well scoped for a 7DRL, includes a good mix of enemies and whatnot.  Granted, this was a team effort.)
  • Roguelike - 4 (Procedural maps, and the tactical interplay between actor and enemy was identical to what I expect in a roguelike game.  But the lack of a proper inventory, items, and RPG mechanics is a little less roguelike than would entail a 5.)

• The game's pixel art looks fantastic.  The "jumping" animations and movement/attack patterns are inspired by Crypt of the Necrodancer.  The core mechanic of creating combo moves is interesting and creates some neat strategies later on.  Combat is deterministic and each enemy type has a unique feature to work around.  Has all the qualities of a true roguelike.  The game feels very polished and bug-free, but hints at features that may not have made it into the game.  All the characters appear to play the same and are only a different sprite.  There is no score or perceivable goal.  There is no indication of floor/depth.  The UI's ZXC panel hides important information on an already-limited screen.  Really great music but gets repetitive over the course of a game.

• Well done everyone, the game feels polished and balanced. The aesthetics are cute and the enemy movements animatedly telegraphed. I would have missed out if I hadn't played this. The editor is a clever twist on the usual mechanics but my only minor issue was figuring out how to use the editor until an enemy eventually dropped an action.