I admit I was a bit worried when I saw the quite raw main menu and the long tutorial (which looked blurry on my 1440p monitor), but the ingame was actually much more polished and looked crisp!
It had good pacing and had me retry a few times but not too many. At first I didn’t understand where I could power up as the tutorial briefly talked about blue flames which I expected to spawn across the level as power ups to reward good moves, but they were in fact spawning at one of the fixed locations (pedestals) after an unclear amount of time, seemingly unrelated to my moves. So I spent my first run drilling through bullets and the boss doing nothing else.
My main issue across all bosses was with the energy system (some feedback similar to bashindan’s):
- energy and health is shared which meant that powering up with pedestel blue flame and getting hit creates a movement of back and forth on the single energy/health gauge, making it a zero-sum game where you may do a few mistakes and get back to square 1 (or even square 0, see below). Having two gauges, while more traditional, would allow to advance toward max power = ability to defeat boss = victory and in parallel toward 0 HP = defeat. Being close to victory and defeat at the same time = climax -> more tension before defeating boss or being defeated. Not saying a game couldn’t make it with a single resource, but in this case I felt like I’d rather kill or die and retry at some point. Of course you’d have to tune the power up steps so you don’t reach max power too early since getting hit would not decrease it anymore (and once you reach high drill level you can basically drill across the whole level and you don’t fear many things anymore)
- same remark as bashindan, having 0 energy preventing drills entirely made the game quite depressing and slow, as you’re waiting for the next blue flame to spawn, unable to protect yourself (and when cornered by bullet patterns there is simply no hope). Ideally you’d still be able to use your basic move (if you separate health and energy, energy would never reach 0 so this wouldn’t happen, but if you want to keep the single resource system you could at least give a minimal Drill attack at level 0).
Now for boss specific feedback:
- boss 2 and 3 have 360 bullet patterns, which per se are not an issue as you can drill through individual bullets. The problem is that you want to drill toward the center when the bubble appears, and sometimes you do it a bit late. So you destroy the bullets instead of the bubble, but only in your path, and often upward. After that, it’s easy to move a little left or right and accidentally touch one of the non-destroyed bullets, making you feel you’re not rewarded, and even punished, for drilling toward the center half a second too late. May have as well got away and drilled tangentially just to reach a safe place. Now, if this was intended as a risk-reward / push-your-luck (not really luck but timing) mechanic to incentivize the player to only drill toward the bubble if they are sure they’ll reach it in time - and if them not to move at all to stay in the vertical path and not touch side bullets, that’s fair. I felt like the bubble time was a bit short for this though. Now, as with all patterns, with training I could reach all bubbles in time (or learn to give up, or force myself not to move sideways), so it was OK (I’m still writing my first impression because eventually, all challenges can be overcome with training and nothing sounds unfair once you master it, but at this point my feedback won’t be super interesting).
- speaking 360 patterns are quite dense and it’s hard to jump between the bullets - prefer drilling through them. Unfortunately in some configurations you drill through it only to fall into another pattern. But this can be reduced by predicting the next 2 patterns and how they will combine (as usual in bullet hell). Generally speaking I find it harder to dodge bullets in side-view platformers, but it’s an interesting challenge.
- boss 3 has a pretty cool intro. It does the first 360 shot without any warning nor bubble though (of course you learn it afterward).
- for boss 3, I tried a few different approaches such as focusing on the center which is the most dangerous pattern (ok if you’re good to dodge the 3-bullet patterns from left and right, but I still managed to get hit :p), or attacking both sides as well (which surprisingly worked better).
EDIT: forgot to add suggestion to fill the energy bar when doing a successful action (dashing through a bubble or projectiles, or specially colored projectiles) since in my suggestion you wouldn’t have pedestals. That said, I now see that having to rush to a pedestal after dodging an attack was actually quite interesting, and predictable. I played Re-Balance in the meantime and it alos has a mechanic where you must keep dodging until a certain item appears to attack, but I found it harder because the “item” could spawn anywhere on a big map - but on a map covered by the screen, it was actually okay.