Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Mantis is a curious hybrid. It begins as an apocryphal roguelite Soulslike - the kind of game you might expect to get covered by Iron Pineapple on YouTube at some point. Its combat has all the core features - light and heavy attack, stamina and a dash move with i-frames, all of which are appropriately insect-styled. While more than a little awkward at times, it is nevertheless impressive for a submission. From midway onwards, however, it plays much more like a shmup instead - both because only the ranged enemies evolve by shooting more projectiles per burst with every floor, while melee ones may deal more damage, but are no faster and so just as avoidable as before, and because by then you would accumulate a veritable army of bees, which are invulnerable and slowly shoot to whenever your cursor is pointing at. Insignificant at first, they start killing things out in the open far faster than you do once their numbers are somewhere between 6 and 10. The final (and only) boss never even came close to me - I just dashed around and let my 20 bees do the work in about 15 seconds. All in all, Mantis is a fun game and a definite recommend, although it would definitely benefit a lot from replacing its four enormous levels that all look the same with a larger number of much smaller floors: the current number of largely identical rooms/corridors takes a while to traverse without feeling meaningful and mainly serves to inflate the amount of available chests and thus boost player's stats well beyond what is reasonable. There is also the room for the usual kind of expansion (more enemies, more sound effects/music, etc.) and to fix the non-biological bugs - it is currently possible to dash so hard into a wall you break out of bounds and cannot get back, forcing you to restart the level.
• This was a fun, arcade style hack and slash game. Aside from the procedurally generated levels, there wasn't a whole lot of traditional roguelike elements to the game. The challenge and aesthetics would put this game right at home on the NES along side the likes of Berzerk or Gauntlet.
• I had a fun time playing with this entry! The concept was an interesting enough hook to get me buzzing around the level a few times. I had a hard time getting any bees to finish the first level, but overall could see something fun here. Thanks for putting this entry together and I hope you enjoyed your project time on this.