I haven't gotten around to playing this one before, but I figured I'd give it a shot and I am seriously glad I did. Sorry I didn't play it sooner! I spent so long on the menu reading through each piece for each breed; it took me nearly ten minutes to even get to the gameplay. It gets so in depth right off the bat! I love all of the different components giving different stats and access to certain abilities, and the various breeds all kind of fit to their own theme.
It's like your thesis is just: "Spore's cell stage on nanoscale steroids." And that's not a bad thing at all. I fucking love it.
I'm sure you know this but the breed description text extends into the adapted zooids selection pane so you can't read it very well. Also how do you pronounce that? Is it Zoo ID or Zoo-Oid or Zoid or what?
Even small enemies seem very smart and are hard to kill--they don't wanna get near anything I have to damage them with, and are ruthless as hell when they get close. But that seems to change when things get larger and have more mass, as they can't just frantically swim away anymore.
The grappling hook is fuckin brutal and I love it.
I don't like that enemies can just immediately pick up destroyed parts of their body as food to heal themselves; it makes sense but it seems kind of off, like maybe there should be a short timer before they can collect it or something.
Every once in a while I came across a green food item I couldn't pick up. It didn't seem to drop from anything, but was just there in the level.
It takes a very long time to recover lost pieces once you've gotten your ass kicked and had all but a few of your pieces stripped off. I sense that it's probably meant to be that way, but it just makes trying to survive a slog once your weapons are gone, and can be kind of irritating that you spend 5-10 minutes swimming around collecting enough green pieces to come back and then just get blasted away by some 50 clawed behemoth because your dash fin fell off.
Depending on your build/piece configuration, sometimes enemies can just push you against a wall and you can't turn anymore, so you just get stuck and die. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, it teaches you to be cautious while building.
It's very challenging and addicting and I'm gonna keep playing for a bit just to see what all there is to see. It's so polished and tight in most areas that it made me forget I was playing a work in progress. This is great stuff! Can't wait to play more!!
Hey, thank you for playing. And I'm super glad you did - no worries about being late to the party, we need playtesting of each version.
We have heard a lot of different pronunciations of Zooid. Since they're based on real Zooids, so you can just follow what wikipedia says how to pronounce :D
The overwhelming amount of parts is due to testing version. At the beginning only Advena breed is available.
Regarding "getting back on your feet" after getting your ass kicked - we've had a lot of criticism for it from different sources and have some ideas for solving it. However, none of them seems like a no-brainer. What could you suggest for solving the "getting back on your feet" issue?
I've noted rest of the things you found that I didn't comment on. Thank you for playing again, I'm glad you liked Sipho. We're in Early Access and providing early-early access builds to the community is great way to playtest new concepts. Cheers!
Comments
I haven't gotten around to playing this one before, but I figured I'd give it a shot and I am seriously glad I did. Sorry I didn't play it sooner! I spent so long on the menu reading through each piece for each breed; it took me nearly ten minutes to even get to the gameplay. It gets so in depth right off the bat! I love all of the different components giving different stats and access to certain abilities, and the various breeds all kind of fit to their own theme.
It's like your thesis is just: "Spore's cell stage on nanoscale steroids." And that's not a bad thing at all. I fucking love it.
I'm sure you know this but the breed description text extends into the adapted zooids selection pane so you can't read it very well. Also how do you pronounce that? Is it Zoo ID or Zoo-Oid or Zoid or what?
Even small enemies seem very smart and are hard to kill--they don't wanna get near anything I have to damage them with, and are ruthless as hell when they get close. But that seems to change when things get larger and have more mass, as they can't just frantically swim away anymore.
The grappling hook is fuckin brutal and I love it.
I don't like that enemies can just immediately pick up destroyed parts of their body as food to heal themselves; it makes sense but it seems kind of off, like maybe there should be a short timer before they can collect it or something.
Every once in a while I came across a green food item I couldn't pick up. It didn't seem to drop from anything, but was just there in the level.
It takes a very long time to recover lost pieces once you've gotten your ass kicked and had all but a few of your pieces stripped off. I sense that it's probably meant to be that way, but it just makes trying to survive a slog once your weapons are gone, and can be kind of irritating that you spend 5-10 minutes swimming around collecting enough green pieces to come back and then just get blasted away by some 50 clawed behemoth because your dash fin fell off.
Depending on your build/piece configuration, sometimes enemies can just push you against a wall and you can't turn anymore, so you just get stuck and die. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, it teaches you to be cautious while building.
It's very challenging and addicting and I'm gonna keep playing for a bit just to see what all there is to see. It's so polished and tight in most areas that it made me forget I was playing a work in progress. This is great stuff! Can't wait to play more!!
Hey, thank you for playing. And I'm super glad you did - no worries about being late to the party, we need playtesting of each version.
We have heard a lot of different pronunciations of Zooid. Since they're based on real Zooids, so you can just follow what wikipedia says how to pronounce :D
The overwhelming amount of parts is due to testing version. At the beginning only Advena breed is available.
Regarding "getting back on your feet" after getting your ass kicked - we've had a lot of criticism for it from different sources and have some ideas for solving it. However, none of them seems like a no-brainer. What could you suggest for solving the "getting back on your feet" issue?
I've noted rest of the things you found that I didn't comment on. Thank you for playing again, I'm glad you liked Sipho. We're in Early Access and providing early-early access builds to the community is great way to playtest new concepts. Cheers!
Password is agdg
For ultimate crazy madness fun I recommend playing Sparta mode