The premise is neat, and I wanted to like the game a bit more, but I ran into a host of pain points along the way.
- There seems to be a little too much information being thrown at the player from the start, presented by the Engineer’s speech. For example, it seemed a bit much being told what and where all the machines were when realistically all I needed to know was where the crafting table and drill were.
- I found myself very frequently pressing the wrong button, firing a laser when I meant to use a melee attack or gather a resource node. I think it may have been better if these different options had unique controls, rather than all being on mouse. If you’re already using keyboard controls as well as mouse controls, I think E could have been used for interacting in general, and perhaps for Melee attacks if there was nothing to interact with.
- Rather than forcibly respawning when firing one too many lasers, I feel the laser should just lock up, preventing you from ending your own survivability.
- It took me one or two random deaths to realize that I had been taking contact damage from enemy corpses. I see that’s already on your list of known bugs, but I think it would have been nice if there was a bit more responsive feedback for taking damage, which would have helped me realize sooner that I was in danger. I could see, for example, a red aura filling the screen while taking damage or something as a simple way of doing that while continuing to allow the game to feel as free as it does movement-wise and hit-wise.
- As far as audio goes, the home base music was pretty good, but the field music, although good, was comparatively a bit too loud. The sound effects were pretty good, though the drill sound loop bleeding into the field was a bit unfortunate.
Once I realized how to play around all the pain points (clicking my own character constantly for melee attacks and gathering, and kiting enemies vertically to get around the shifted hurtbox and inability to use melee attacks in any other direction), there was a pretty fun game to be had! The audio and visuals overall was pretty solid. I think if you polished up the issues above, made it easier to control, and added a bit more variation to each trip to the field, it would shine a lot more!