Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• PRESENTATION
  

  Graphics were a mix of various tiles and assets. Some of them fit together well, others were a little odd (the trees, for example, looked quite pixelled in comparison to the other tiles). There was also a few issues with the tiles themselves not being aligned correctly, thus showing lines all around (the cobblestone path is a very big example of this).

  Mapping was detailed in areas but fell prey to some new developer mapping issues like different wall heights when they share the same ceiling, or missing wall tiles. Maps were also a bit large - some areas were extremely bland and empty like the maze map.

  Sound was decent. There was some use of sounds outside of the usual areas but some were a bit weird - the walking sound when you're stepping from one map to the other is odd for outside maps.

  Music was okay. It wasn't amazing but most of it fit the scenes they were in and there were actually some good dungeon tunes that added a very tropical feel.

  The writing was a bit stilted. There were a few grammatical errors but the biggest issue was the punctuation issues. It got better as you went, but there were a lot of ellipses usage that wasn't necessary.

  The characters were okay. Nothing amazing but decent - they talked to each other a bit which is always nice, but they didn't seem like they were all that different from each other.

  The character portraits were very nice though.
   
  The story itself was a bit cliche and what plot twists there were were easy to guess from the moment they were introduced. It didn't do a bad job at telling the story though. It was a little fast-paced but that's expected when you're trying to fit a game to a time limit.

  GAMEPLAY
  Gameplay consisted of walking around, doing puzzles and fighting.

  The puzzles in the game were all very easy and basic. There was a warp puzzle, a push boulder puzzle and a maze. Also an interact in a specific order puzzle, though the answer to that was given to you right off the bat so it wasn't at all difficult.

  The battles consisted of attacking and skills. Attacking was interesting - you could do combinations to have more attacks occur. You hit buttons as the popped up to see if the next hit would hit. If you missed you didn't get the next hit. This would have been more interesting if each character had had a customised combo - as it was, it was pretty much the same for all of them.

  Spells were learned after a plot point and allowed you to unlock different elemental spells over the course of the game. The spells were useful and different for each character, and they came into play well enough.

  
  

  ENGAGEMENT
  This game rather bored me a lot. The puzzles weren't engaging enough to keep my interest, the story was a bit on the bland side and the characters didn't hold my interest. I couldn't come to care for their struggle as they were all a bit bland and samey.

  The biggest annoyance was two-fold - the empty boring maps (especially the dungeon ones where you just walk around doing nothing) and the battles.

  The battles took far too long. The enemies had a lot of health, hit hard and weren't overly affected by your skills. While that sounds interesting, it really wasn't. The difficulty of the battles came from four of the same enemy just doing the same thing - either guarding or hitting. Most turns I just spammed attack, until I got magic, which had me instead spam that. It was mind-numbing repetitiveness. The battles had promise with the combo system, and you could have had enemies with different elemental weaknesses and strengths, different spells, anything that set them apart from each other. Oh, and they had a ton of HP too, which meant that you were doing between 50-200 damage to enemies that had 3-5000 each... four of them. It was bland and boring gameplay.

  
  

  THEME
  The theme was 'saving the world' and I guess it did that okay. The game sufficiently explained everything to you so you weren't left wondering what to do and how to do things, but there wasn't really much build up to the world being in danger to make you worry about it. There were no consequences, nothing to show that there was something wrong. Some guy just walking up going "Yo, I'm gonna wreck this world." and then breaking some statues and leaving. Mechanically there was also a lot of drag instead of upbeat worry. It just didn't do a great job reflecting that theme outside of some dialogue where the heroes worry a bit.

  32/80