This was the most complete and fully-realized game I've played so far in the jam. Congratulations! The art is well done, the theme fits the prompt, I found the intro text funny, and the overall gameplay was pretty solid! A few criticisms would be that the character defaulting to the down position is pretty annoying. That may have been a design choice, but given that the cursor is a crosshair, it feels like you had a different aiming system in mind. Also, the game is pretty exploitable. I found that I could get to the boss and move back a few areas and pelt him offscreen with practically no threat. Honestly, these are really nitpicky, though, considering how much you two managed to do in 7 days, so well done! That was a lot of fun!

Hi! I really liked your game, but in my opinion it was a little repetitive, and the soundtrack got a bit irritating after some time playing. Lastly, I would like to say that the shooting  was very difficult to control, but your game, in the end, was pretty good! Nice job!

The shooting was a bit hard and the audio got kind of irritating after a while but your game was pretty good! Nice job!

Very nice game ! I just find it hard to shoot at the ennemies, splendid work !

That was a fun game. I like the art.

That was really fun!  I like that it had a little story to it, it really helped felt like an adventure as I battled the enemies haha!  The sprites had a fun feel to them as well (my favorite was the last friend with and without the helmet haha).  One suggestion I have that could be useful for gameplay would be to make it so you stay facing in the direction of the last thing you pressed to help with aiming as auto facing down made it a little hard to shoot sometimes.  Also, it could be cool to rotate the bullets depending on the direction you are shooting for some visual goodness. Overall, great job! And I had a fun time playing :) 

I like the character designs in this and the punchy effect of shooting the enemies. I found after replaying a few times that the speed upgrade makes it difficult to get through some of the spaces. Maybe wider corridors for the next update? also perhaps having the character not auto face down would help with the targeting. I found at the boss battle my main way of succeeding was staying at the top of the screen. I like the boss music btw. Good job on your first top down game

I love the game! The default position of the player when letting go of directional input made shooting very challenging which was an interesting way to handle movement, and the overall look and feel of the game was very nice. I also enjoyed being able to shoot in 2 directions when pressing multiple movement keys. Great job!

Hey nice work. I wish I haven't saved the speed friend though, I wasn't in any hurry to die faster ^^" 

Feel free to rate mine:

https://gamesofarcadia.itch.io/the-elementals

Overall it's an amazing game. The aiming made the boss fight really challenging. I had to either stay on the upper side of the maps or keep on spamming the controls to shoot the enemies.

Very fun game and I like it. :D

I Love the art of the game the red waddling enemies look wacky and fun. Though the aiming felt a little misleading when I first played I thought I was aiming with mouse as of the reticle though the level layout was cool running though  a maze until you find the boss. other than that solid concept, I enjoyed it :D

Great sprite work. Love the overall look & feel of the game.  Did struggle with the shooting & did spend my 4 attempts running away from the worm guys.

Interesting game, nice graphics and color scheme, and somewhat fitting, but maybe not the most interesting music (but nice SFX).

Made it to the boss, but I was pretty much running away from the enemies the entire time getting there. I tried to fight through them several times but got literally nowhere.

Biggest flaw in this game is a fundamental flaw regarding making a top down shooter where the mouse is of use: The mouse should have an impact on aiming, preferably full 360 degree aiming (but I understand having made a game in this style in the past this makes animation more difficult for sure).

At least even having 4 directional shooting would be good where you could stay facing a direction, but you can't even do that in this game, so often you have to run towards enemies and take damage to even be able to hit them. If the shooting in the game (a shooter) is incredibly difficult to use, you need to scale the difficulty elsewhere to make it decent fun.

A 4 direction shooter game where enemies can shoot at you from angles other than your own available angles is just plain evil. It's sorta similar to giving a boss a healthbar that takes 15 minutes to take away, yet punishes the player brutally for a single mistake, IE non fun game design.

Other than that, the only fault I could find is the characters hitbox being really annoying. My advice working with this perspective is to make 2 hitboxes, one a square or circle around the characters feet for their movement (colliding with walls) hitbox, because realistically a characters upper body/head wouldn't prevent them from walking up to a wall. The second hitbox should approximate the players body for enemy shooting at/hitting them, but shouldn't impact their movement.

I hope some of this feedback is helpful. Don't think I am trying to say you didn't put effort into the game, I thought it was a really interesting concept, though with some flaws. Definitely looking forward to see what you do next though should you tackle the genre again.

very cool game, i liked the character and enemies design, very fun game :)

Fun dungeon crawler with a story. I liked that it's a sequel to a previous game too. I think it could've benefited from a bit smaller of a collider to make navigating the halls easier as well as making the sprite smaller so it's easier to see when you line up with a hall. I love the enemy design especially the heart guys, that's just a fun enemy. I also agree with the comments about shooting, I just found myself going to the top of the room and releasing the controls to automatically shoot down most of the time. Besides that I had a lot of fun playing, and I'm gonna follow your page in case we get another sequel :)

Loved having a story with the game, don't see that often with many gamejam submissions, great work :) 

Check out my game, R0B0TS: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-5/rate/920109

The story mode and the fact that each rescued friend gives you some bonus piece of gameplay makes it pretty fun and interesting to keep going. I only wish the player could face the last direction of the keyboard pressed, because it seems it is fixed to always face down and makes the shooting a little difficult. This is a pretty enjoyable game, good job!

Interesting storied small game! I like it)

Beat it on the second try! The shooting was difficult, though it was kind of fun learning how to overcome it. The strength of this game is its theme! Nice job. The friend and monster sprites are pretty nice too.

Its always nice to see some storytelling in small games. i also liked the music which suited the atmosphere. Enemy sprites are also good!

there are two things which i'd say had flaws:

- map is over complicated.

- it'd be better if i didn't have to move toward the enemy to shoot at them. when i don't press move buttons i always face down.

overall, good job!