Oh, is that the game from the organizers?
Very polished!
I’ve been looking at a few circle arena boss fights and in this one too, rotating the camera to track the player character is quite nice. It’s hard to counter to rotation to aim correctly while moving, fortunately it’s easy to stabilize and stop during boss 2, and to aim at the flying enemy while moving during boss 3. Boss 3 is probably easier than boss 2 but it’s actually nice to move more freely at the end!
The reload mechanic is a nice retake on the “perfectly timed reload” from some other shooter games, with a penalty of slow reload if failed. The tutorial page seems to miss some text “Reload” before it explains the reload mechanic so I didn’t understand it, but it was easy to understand by experimenting. Same thing for the boost description about the blue/yellow gauge area, it should state “Using the boost” somewhere.
Nice to have damage + damage confirm or recovery in player character health “bar”, to reduce punishment and reward player who pays attention after the first hit.
I had troubles with the enemies that explode sending bullets, but it forced me to manage them by killing them one by one (or several but only in safe times when there were no spikes), so it was manageable in the end (although unfortunately sometimes spikes would appear quite fast after I make my decision to kill them).
My issues:
- lack of feedback on damage, esp. for boss 1: no particular feedback FX/SFX on eyes when hit (about the same as when hitting a wall / non-vulnerable part). As a result, during phase 2 when it’s invincible I tried to shoot at the orange parts (thinking orange was color coding for weak spot). It did nothing but it wasn’t obvious since there was no clear feedback to start with. In the end I just looked at the boss health bar and deduced it was invulnerable while health bar was empty.
- some bullet patterns are really tight and player character hurtbox is quite big, matches the model (understandable, as it’s not a classic bullet hell either). I tried to play smart and zigzag between the bullets but always got punished for it (typically by double hit, confirming damage) so I gave up and tried to just avoid the tight patterns completely
- … but sometimes it’s not possible because you’re stuck between that and some other damaging entity (in boss 2, the “tail” and its spikes, or the small enemies projectiles on death and the large spike areas), and the best seems to run across the level away from them, taking one hit intentionally, and count on the timed recovery (didn’t try though as I kept trying to fit right between them, to no avail)
- boss 2 large spikes covering 1/4 of the circle: appear quite fast, esp. during phase 2 and you need very good reflexes to get away… if you happened to be near their middle it’s almost impossible to get away in time
Bugs
At the end, boss 1 timer was 0
The final button to go back to Main menu didn’t work, I had to Alt+F4
UI improvement suggestions
- pause menu item / shortcut to quick restart the current boss: after losing 1 HP near the beginning it will be too hard, may as well die to restart, but it’s cleaner to do it via menu or button shortcut (require holding it to avoid accidental press). And exiting the level would go back to main menu and you’d have to restart from boss 1.