Pretty good overall! I like the graphics and the music is alright, great job for a solo entry especially since you made everything yourself.

There’s some implementation mistakes:

• the fire rate depends on how fast you press the tab button. IT should be tied to a cooldown and you should be able to hold the button down.
• It looks like monsters outside of the screen can’t die (the projectile disappears?). Since they move super fast that did not feel great.

The TAB key for shooting is weird. I suggest implementing rebindable controls for next time, you can check https://github.com/GodotWildJam/gwj-accessibility-scripts for an implementation.

My arm is physically hot lol. My years of Mario Party button mashing experience have paid off! I cleared out all 10 Hives. But man, those little critters can take a beating. I think having a press and hold fire system would have been nice, even if it was slower then spamming [TAB]. Just to have that option ya know? Overall, fun little metroid like game. I liked unlocking the different items. Was a bit sad that there wasn't more to unlock. :P

Great entry Wolf. ^^

This is a great entry. Music is a bit repetitive but it fits the pace of the game. I think having the weapons on auto-fire, or at least an auto-fire option, would help a lot. The way it is, it's a great hindrance to accessibility as some people have difficulty repeatedly pressing a button. I've got perfectly healthy fingers, but even my fingers got tired after playing for a while.

Great entry! The monsters are a bit tanky but thats aliens so what do I know :D The controls feel very nice, the gfx and sfx are nice!

I think I found a bug where the purple monster would get stuck (after jump) on the jumping player and do no damage, but it happened once and I wasnt able to reproduce it

Hooray, gamepad controls! :)

I managed to get all the way through the game. I think I agree with most of the comments below on the enemy speed, etc.. really, I think balance is the main thing the game needs a bit more of.

In particular, the game felt a bit tedious, which I think is due to the 10 separate hives combined with a total lack of progression in terms of upgrades or enemy types past the point where you get all three upgrades. I ended up actually defeating the hives early on in the game last, as I went back to try to destroy the wall next to the UFO, and then exploring that whole section took a long time, and then I still had to backtrack to the hives that I had seen before obtaining the gun.

I think, however, the main problem here is actually permadeath. I don't think the game ended up actually being that long, but I was certainly stressed out over dying and losing all my progress. I think the game felt a lot more tedious because I was internally like, well, if I die, I have to do this all over again...

That said, permadeath did make the game feel more tense. But I personally do not prefer it.

An interesting phenomenon is my perception of the enemy health. I read in some of your other comments that they only took 4 hits to kill, and I thought that must be way off as it felt like they usually took like 20 bullets or more... when I went back and counted the enemy did only take 4 hits, but it definitely did not feel that way when playing the game. Perhaps I simply missed a lot of shots because the enemies are moving so fast..? Or perhaps there are usually a couple enemies on a floor, and so the shots are absorbed into several instead of focused on a single enemy, making them all take a seemingly long time to kill..? I'm not sure. Either way, I think making enemies *feel* like they only take 4 hits would be an improvement. My guess is the best way to do this would be to make them move slower.

That said, the core gameplay is pretty solid and fun. I think my perception is filtered a bit by the permadeath as mentioned--it just obscures the fun of the game by making me stress out. I'm also not a big metroidvania player, but the metroidvania formula worked well as far as I could tell in this game. Getting the boots was a nice upgrade, and when I decided to go back to the UFO because I knew there were some high platforms above it, and got rewarded with the shield, that was pretty nice.

Fun game, but it needs to ramp up a little. I think the beginning monsters should've died in 1.  

Impressive for just a week though!

Ultimately I liked this game! The art is really nice and the controls, for the most part, feel very responsive.

That said…

• The bullets bunching up while moving, while it doesn’t harm the game, feels a bit off.
• The little purple monsters take a couple too many hits to kill. Even with the bunched up bullets I felt like I couldn’t take them down fast enough. Given how much of the initial area they take up, they might be a hair over powered.

Those are just little nit picks though, so take them for what they’re worth. Very nice game and well done!

I really like your general go with metroidvanians and run & gun platfomers, though I think the ninja game you made got a lot more balancing done? I really liked the upgrades in this, I think the level design was great with your scope: you're guided quite naturally to the double jump upgrade, but if you paid attention you saw there was an upgrade close to the start so you can go back to that to find the shield upgrade.

I think the game's difficulty eased up a lot after finding that upgrade, because then you get a full recharge from killing a spider.

The weapon upgrade was a bit underwhelming but visually it was very nice!

I agree that the current speed and camera making the game way to hard (at least for me).  Which is a shame, because I really like the presentation and would have liked to play more of it. I think, the fast movement speed for the player and the enemy might work, if the enemies would take fewer bullets to kill.

A nice submission overall, albeit a bit unpolished. The player and the enemies are moving extremely fast, making it hard to react.

Also, I’ve never seen tab used as fire key.

Edit: Oh I’ve seen why this happened, that’s understandable.

The controls and camera could use a little work. The camera doesn't keep your character in the middle of the screen, making it hard to see what's coming, and both your character and the enemies move so quickly that it's hard to react to incoming hazards in time. Also, the control scheme is a little odd; tab to shoot?