Review Time!

For starters, I adore this game's presentation. Everything, from the low detail 3D models, to the HUD and UI contents, looks like mid 2000's PC games, like PopCap's work around that time. Everything has a lot of style, and that results in a very memorable presentation. The music is also very cool, it sets a pretty nice atmosphere, and man, I really don't see videogames using voice samples all that often. It's always pretty cool when it's done.

Unfortunately, I don't have as many positive things to say about the gameplay itself. What quite honestly kills this game is that most of its elements encourage the player to avoid combat rather than engage with it. Your amount of points is directly related to how many seconds you've been alive, and literally nothing else. Killing enemies does not give you extra points, and considering you have limited ammo, running away is literally the best solution. What reinforces the problem is that staying away from enemies is actually super easy, all of them follow the player side by side, so staying away from danger is just a matter of circling around them. And yet another problem is how the enemies all can shoot multiple projectiles at once, yet the player's controls are absurdly slippery. Avoiding those projectiles can sometimes be damn near impossible depending of the situation, so the best solution is to simply not trigger them at all.  And finally, on top of all of that, there is an acceleration button, which serves no purpose to the gameplay besides instantly yeeting you out of danger, discouraging engagement in combat even further.

It seems the game has been inspired by Asteroids, which is a game that does have slippery controls, but the difference is that all of the obstacles are destructible, there's no projectile that can't be destroyed to speak of. So dodging attacks isn't actually unfair, it's a matter of planning and reacting in time. And obstacles show up in all sides in Asteroids, rather than just one direction like in this game. Because of that, you are forced to engage in combat.

And finally, the tutorial just covers way too much of the screen, which is very bothersome.

In conclusion, I love the visuals, but while the controls themselves are not necessarily bad, the execution of the gameplay left a lot to be desired.

Review Time!

This game has quite some charm, and I really enjoy the art style it has going for it. I wonder why specifically the character uses Unity assets, though.

In terms of controls... it lacks polish. The jump feels way too slow, as in, it takes way too much time for you to get propelled upwards, and the jump isn't tall enough to properly jump over the first boss. You also can't control how high your jump will be, which is extremely important for a platformer to feel good to control. You should be able to start falling earlier if you release the jump button. And while you can make a good game with a character that can only jump and attack, an extra move like a roll or a dash would have been appreciated.

The major problem I have with the game, though, is that the boss takes way too little damage. An approach where the boss takes way more damage, but their attacks are harder to avoid would have been preferrable. Because they take so little damage, the player is encouraged to take the boss' attacks in an attempt to try to land as many hits as possible.

The first boss is kind of janky. The boss constantly moves left and right, and it turns around if the player jumps over it, so attacking the boss feels very awkward, with them pushing you as you attack them. The second boss is much better, but still nothing very exciting. If the controls were better, it might have been a better experience.

Overall, I could take some fun from it, and there is potential to be found, but lack of polish in both the player's controls and the boss' patterns push this game back.

And well, the game ties into the Game Jam's theme in an extremely loose way. It's a very unimportant narrative point, while other games made it a central mechanic of their game, or at least an important one. Which is why I'm giving this game two stars.

Review Time!

This is probably the best game I've played in this Jam so far. A simple, but addictive strategy game about killing bugs and taking over their resources. The mechanics are all intuitive and destroying nests is incredibly satisfying. Since this game is so simple, there isn't really much I can say. The game is just simple, relaxing fun.

I have two critiques, though. I don't think you should be able to die, because avoiding enemies is extremely easy, since they don't follow you at all. So you will always die for a stupid goof across what was basically a breeze. I like the idea of eating your own bugs to recover your health, but when you have so many bugs, it can be abused effortlessly.

I also think that for a simple game like that, it is just SO. LONG. I think twenty to thirty minutes would have been fine for a game like this, but it took me fifty minutes to get a thousand bugs. Because of that, the game ends up not being that replayable. If playing this game for fifty minutes straight taught me anything, is that this simple formula eventually gets old.

Despite all of this, this is a pretty enjoyable experience, and I have to say I would really like to see this worked into a full game! New types of bugs could be added, there could be game modes where bugs try harder to kill the player, and the required time to beat it could be honestly much shorter. I wish you luck with your next works!

Review Time!

Right off the bat, this game is extremely charming and pretty to look at! The graphics are simple, but quite memorable, and the character designs vary from adorable to hilarious!

The platforming was way too simple for my liking, but it's certainly serviceable, considering the length of the game. And the game controls very well in spite of that!

The combat was pretty fun too. I'm a fan of Deltarune, so playing something inspired by Undertale was pretty fun.

If I were to criticize it in any way, it would be that I was hoping the game explored its original mechanics further, like the collectable double jump. But the game is perfectly fine as it is. Not very replayable, but as I've mentioned before, very charming.

Review Time!

This game has a funny premise, with a surprisingly grim execution, and this is something I can appreciate. With that said, this has to be the most uneventful game I've played so far in this Game Jam.

There's no reason to why you wouldn't keep both conveyor belts activated, since spotting bad ducks is extremely easy due to they literally shining, and the conveyor belt carries the ducks in a very slow pace, easily allowing you to take care of both conveyors with no challenge at all. So I really don't see why you would need to activate the second conveyor belt on your own.

Besides picking up bad ducks, there's absolutely nothing else to do, and this can become extremely tedious. There could be ways to make the experience slightly more interesting: you could have made so the player *has* to discard the bad ducks in some trash compactor, or else they will follow you and kill you after a while. You could have made so the conveyor belt start moving on its own, forcing you to turn it on once in a while. Anything that could at least keep you busy, you know?

You have a time limit of 1000 seconds. That's 16 minutes. Sixteen minutes of doing nothing besides occasionally picking ducks. The experience could have definitely been made more interesting by adding a few extra tasks.

The only compliment I could really give to this game besides the wacky premise, is the fact the room you're in is very realistic (in terms of functionality and layout, not graphics) and claustrophobic, which is a bummer because you only need to interact with, like, 10% of the room.

Game Jams are a learning experience for everyone, and I hope you get out of it with a positive mindset. There's always a tomorrow to make something better, but it all starts with taking criticism.

Review Time!

This game is pretty simple, and executes what it aims to do fairly well. You usually can just chop the tree and the zombies will die when they get close, but sometimes you will have to change the direction you're chopping to damage specific enemies, and the giant zombies demand a greater attention from you. I have no issues with this, I just wish there was something else to it, like a rolling move.

Besides that, there were two issues that bothered me while playing. The first is that the chopping hitbox isn't communicated properly. The zombies get hit when they get "somewhere close enough" to the player during the axe swing animation. How close? It's completely unclear. Adding a sort of slash animation would have helped wonders, something akin to the nail slash in Hollow Knight or Zero's Z-Saber in the Megaman X series. Another thing that bothers me is that the collision of the giant zombie is a bit odd. It seems smaller than it should be. Every time I try to hit the giant zombie, it seems that I'm a little bit too far away. It's not frustratingly hard, but still bothersome.

Overall, the execution wasn't completely perfect, but the game was quite fun, at least on my first playthrough.

Review Time!

Starting with the positives, this game has many interesting concepts! An endless runner where you travel through eras is a pretty cool concept! I also really like how you can alternate between charging an attack and regenerating your health. It makes health regeneration a very useful tool, but not something broken. It's balanced and fun to use.

Now for some criticism. The game doesn't control quite ideally. Being able to accumulate speed by sliding down slopes is very welcome, but losing speed by simply climbing slopes is not. It often makes the game a bit frustrating, sometimes even unfair, because it actively works against you when trying to avoid enemies. In spite of that, the controls can still be somewhat fun. Jumping works fine enough.

I did say that health regeneration is balanced and fun, and it is, but I also think the witch's damage should have been a bit higher, because just tanking the hit and keep regenerating is usually a perfectly viable option. You will only really need to avoid the witch's damage if your health is very low, which I admit is something that can happen not so rarely.

Overall, it's a fun time with some interesting concepts. Just some rebalancing and control changes would have turned this into gold. Some variety would have been welcome as well, but I know quite well how little two weeks are, so it's perfectly excusable.

Review Time!

These are simple minigames, and there's really not much to say.

Roller Coaster is probably the least good game out of the two. The controls are rather odd, keyboard controls would be a far better option than clicking on the rails with your mouse. The only way there seems to make you complete the game faster is by collecting coins, and since both the rollercoaster and the coins move at a constant speed, there isn't really much room to improvement, making this the least replayable minigame.

Shopping Game is much better. Since you're the one dragging the items with your mouse, there's a ton of room for error, and as a result, a ton of room for improvement. I think making the prices of each item random was not a good decision, though. If they were the same every time, there would be much more room for consistency, which is also important to make a game replayable.

I'm honestly kind of impressed the minigames show you how long you've took to complete them, yet doesn't seem to invest into this idea strongly.

The concept of this minigame collection is quite interesting, I just think it could have been executed better, but overall, it's not bad at all.

Review Time!

First of all, this game is conceptually not that interesting. There's two ways to approach a concept like killing a thousand enemies: you can make so you ravage through dozens of enemies at once for around three minutes, or you can make a slow, repetitive killing spree that could last for dozens of minutes. You decided to take the latter option, which leads to a very uninteresting game on its own. It would be much more fun conceptually if you killed 20 to 30 enemies per second with an extremely powerful gun, rather than having to kill one at a time in a repetitive fashion.

Furthermore, this is probably not the most suitable premise for a game jam. Making a game like this work requires some well thought-out maps and diverse enemies with diverse patterns. This isn't something that can be done in only two weeks, and it shows.

And unfortunately, not only the premise isn't very promising, but the execution also leaves a lot to be desired. The map has extremely poorly communicated boundaries, with invisible walls being all across the arena in extremely unintuitive locations. There's nothing for you to jump over, anything you could use strategically to avoid or lure enemies, just a regular flat arena with some obstacles placed across it. 

Not only that, but shooting also feels extremely unsatisfying. More often than not, your shots are going to miss when they absolutely should have hit, and it's often frustrating how such a tiny bullet isn't sometimes capable of hitting such massive skulls. Sometimes you will even miss shots against the gigantic blue skulls, sometimes even when they're close to you!

And finally, the last problem I've spotted was the camera. Since it's a first person shooter, the player is in charge of moving the camera around, and that's not inherently a bad thing. The problem is that the game isn't designed to accommodate that. Certain enemies are faster or larger than others, but all of them chase you in the exact same way. This will result in you constantly walking backwards while trying to shoot the enemies on your way, which then results in you crashing onto objects obstructing your path or even enemies that were chasing from you behind. Looking at all directions at all times isn't exactly a solution, either, because then killing enemies will be far less efficient, and you're already pretty weak as you are.

I'll have to admit that I did not manage to finish the game. Maybe some of my points don't hold as much weight when taking the whole experience into consideration, but the game really didn't do a good job at hooking me.

With all of that said... how could this game have been better?

First of all, I think this concept would have worked infinitely better if it was a 2D, top-down, third person shooter. Think of something like Enter the Gungeon, or even better, Vampire Survivors. This way, you would have a perfect vision of all enemies around you, it would be far easier to move your aim around, and making proper collisions for the enemies and bullets would be far easier. Not only that, you would have time to make the game far more complex, since it would be a 2D game.

Maybe you could have even added a knife, or some sort of melee weapon to the player that deals more damage than the guns despite being more risky to use, to give more variety in how the player could approach certain enemies.

If you *insist* in keeping it as a third-person shooter, though, at least make your weapons stronger, and don't make every single skull follow you at once. Instead, make them only follow you if they spot you. Make some skulls with dashes, charge attacks, maybe there could be some skulls that stay still but can shoot you, and so goes on. Oh yeah, and please put some mountains on the invisible walls.

Game Jams are a learning experience for everyone, and I hope you can take this project not as a failure, but as a worthwhile learning process. I wish you luck in your future works.

It has potential, really took me back in time to when flash games were all the rage.