Great game, and an amazing job from your team.
Lots of contents, and with some nice polish.
I had some small problems :
-The jumping sound was pretty low in volume compared to all the other sounds, which is a bit weird.
-That fact that you can't shoot behind you makes shooting and moving pretty stiff, which is a downer.
-The "shooting range levels". (and overall the fact that there is quite a focus on the enemies). I don't understand, since your game works way better as a puzzle platformer. Precise moves and shoots seems to be neither the focus of the game, nor a good match with the controls. So, those levels were disapointing for me.
-Okay, this may seem weird but I feel that the game ends "too early", or have too much content. What I mean is that your are still teaching new mechanics even during the last levels. (spoiler if anybody is reading this before finishing the game) :
For instance, the self rewind comes in pretty late into the game. The revive with a delayed orb is only used once. Or the fact that the shots go through objects that don't have a previous state, which is only used for the penultimate level.
I understand what you're going for, but it's not that great to teach new things to a player up to the end, since it makes these mechanics feel underused.
However, these are all really minor things.
Again, your game is great, and these critics are merely to point at the details that could be improved to make it an even more awesome game.
Viewing post in Reverse Engineer jam comments
Oh, thanks so much! We really appreciate your constructive criticism, though we probably wont have the chance to change all that much. We will release one update when the Jam ends to improve stability and fix minor bugs and quirks, but will then most likely discontinue development to focus on new projects. But again, thank you very much for the great review and the rate!
I too want to thank you for your detailed feedback.
Most people don't notice these small polishing issues. We had to cut down our initial polishing time from 3 days to 1-2 days. So we didn't have the time to fix these small issues.
Very interesting that you feel the game ends too early. My approach for making levels was to introduce one new interesting idea to each level, so there is always something new. I probably should have made more levels with smaller ideas that reuse many of the old ideas. And I probably should have done a decent ending.
It's still a game jam game, after all, but your feedback is really helpful.
Thanks for playing!
-Claas