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Aesthetics and sound are really nice but the controls are just extremely awkward and bring down an otherwise great game. I get you're supposed to grapple onto the rocks to build up speed but it just doesn't feel like you have much control over it. The hitbox or raycast or whatever you're using for the grappling seems really off. Sometimes I'd grapple a rock on the other side of the screen easily despite my cursor not being that close to it and sometimes I couldn't grapple a rock that was pretty close to me no matter how much I clicked and where my cursor was in relation to it. Can certain rocks not be grappled? It also seriously sucks that rocks can't be destroyed with your blaster. It just results in situations where you slowly hurtle towards your impending doom and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no other rocks to manoeuvre and the lasers from your blaster do nothing to damage it. It ends up feeling frustrating to play and not in the "Damn, I should have done X instead" way but the "I was not in control of that situation" way.

Despite that, you did a great job with the graphics and this is a solid entry. Nice work!

Deleted 211 days ago
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Haha, no worries. I tend to go off on a tangent sometimes and this is one of those cases.

I don't mind games that have a high skill ceiling, but the controls need to be 110% rock solid for them to feel fair and fun rather than frustrating. Take Super Meat Boy for example. Pretty much every death in that game is due to my own mistakes because the controls are tight and responsive. Any 'impossible situations' I end up in are due to my own error and that's why the game got so popular in the first place. In Gravity Grapple, it's just too easy to end up in a situation where you're at the game's mercy regardless of whether you made a mistake or not. I've since played it a bit more and got a bit better but it feels like even if I became a master I'd still end up dying to stuff out of my control. The randomness of the rocks, the floaty space movement and the weird grappling hitboxes are just too unpredictable and unintuitive to ever gain full mastery over. Whenever I die in Super Meat Boy I know exactly what I did wrong, but in Gravity Grapple I just question whether there was anything else at all that I could have done to survive.

I get what you're saying about aiming the grapple being an extra skill factor but I'm almost certain there's some kind of  issue with the hitbox of the rocks. It seems like you need to grapple a very specific point of the rock that differs with every one. Some are close to the centre and easy to get but others seem to be on the top or bottom or in some cases off the rock entirely. I know this because there have been a few occasions where the line(I assume it uses a LineRenderer) ends at a point behind the rock  or slightly off one of the sides rather than on it. I should just be able to right click on any point on the rock and be able to grapple to it, but it doesn't seem to work like that for some reason or another.

I hope that explains my thoughts a bit better. I went off on another tangent again but hopefully it's helpful for you! :)

Deleted 211 days ago