itch.io

Ah yes, it's time. I'm gonna be mean sorry 😭

First impressions: 
Very cute main menu!
Small UI issue here tho: most people don't know what "BGM" stands for,  just use "Music" instead. In the grand scheme of things it's a very minor thing but yeah.

So the whole thing is very cute and stuff, I like the small storyline you made, graphically and audio-wise it's pretty good...

BUT THE GAMEPLAY?
Hell nah we have a lot to talk about here.

Firstly the controls.
This is the most outrageous set of controls I've ever seen; it barely follows the common control schemes of all other games!

• WASD: for movement ✅
• Inventory: 1/2/3/4/5 ✅ (would like scrolling as well but oh well)
• Rotate camera: middle mouse button??? ❌❌❌ 
  • Terrible! It's really hard to press down constantly and you're required to look around for the majority of the game. Would recommend just unbinding this and making the camera move around freely all the time!
• Interact/Loot: Space Bar 🟨 (I'll give it a pass but I'd like to see [E] or [F] a lot more)
• Consume Item - LMB 🟨(I'll give it a pass once again, but if you're picking up items using the keyboard, you should use them with a keyboard keybind as well! For me it feels weird to switch between input devices for the same item here)
• Drop Item: RMB or backspace ❌
  • If you don't make camera movement constant, you should at least bind it to right click which is really common for third person games. RMB should not be a secondary action for this kind of a game!
  • Would recommend using Minecraft's [Q] instead since it's already close to WASD.
• Call to location ❓❓❓
  • What does this do? It's never explained at any point of the tutorial and when I tried it ingame one of the guys just came to my location and did nothing...

Ok I'm done with rambling on controls... Let's talk about the gameplay.

The gameplay is well... repetetive. But I think enough people have said that by now. I have multiple issues with the game design of this:

1. Non-animal "ammunition" is practically worthless as ammo. This makes the game 100% about trying to find the closest animal and removes all strategy from the game since the animals just one shot everything.
2. There's no real danger in the game. Since all non-animal items are edible and regenerate health, you're basically unkillable because there are so many items everywhere, you just won't ever run out of them, and the cannonballs hit you so rarely anyway that there's almost no tension.
3. The level design is ALMOST good, but it needs a few things IMO: 
   1. The first thing being a second cannon. Splitting the map into two points of interest would basically double the amount of strategy in the game.
   2. A shortcut from the cannon to the lower island would drastically speed up the game and would add an aditional fun moment to the game (because who doesn't like jumping off a cliff?)
   3. More spawning spaces with different routes to make collecting animals more interesting.
   4. You already added those extra islands to the map, why can't we access them? You could add special items to each one of those islands and reward the player for taking that extra journey! Would once again add more strategy to the game.
4. Add more interesting attacks to the enemy pirates. One of the cooler ideas I have right now is if the pirates would shoot a literal skeleton on your island which starts running towards you and dies after about 10-15 seconds. This would once again spice up the current "running around collecting stuff" gameplay by introducing extra obstacles!

That's about it for gameplay. Overall this is a very cozy and graphically well designed game, however the gameplay and controls need a lot more work for the game to continue being fun after the first 5 waves. I don't know if there's an end to this but I went until the 12th wave, where the animals stopped spawning for some reason so I just gave up.