We had a chance to play with 4 of us last night. We played for a couple hours
and HAD A BLAST! We had played the previous alpha, but our two friends had not and were fresh eyes, and they really enjoyed this game. I've noted down a bunch of observations and feedback!
First of all, I really like the new stacking mechanism. Last time we played, I
think you had to throw something up in the air and wait for it to fall on to
the very top - now when you pick up, it's instantly added to the stack. I
think this makes perfect sense and really tightens the controls alot!
We tried the 3 multiplayer modes available:
* Free for all - This is where we spent the most time, had a ton of fun. Our
friends picked up the game really quick, and we were all yelling at each
other throughout the game :-) The controls were pretty intuitive.
Compared to single player experience, this was so different! So much harder to get stacks to the van. Small stacks easier because you are faster and can run from other people, larger stacks you are going slower and very risky because other people can knock you down. This was a great balance mechanic.
We played this mode probably the most.
Also - it seems we were really competitive at stealing each other's
gorillas and policemen :-)
Suggestion:
-- Maybe add longer invincibility after knock-out time so one player can't
just keep harassing, or maybe make it so that same player can't knock another
person down immediately.
* Teams - This was super fun! I think there are still a few bugs to be worked
out, but overall we enjoyed this mode. We were quickly trying to develop
strats, such as guarding our teammate from knock downs while they stack
items. It was still super hard though :-P I think this mode has some great
potential, the dynamic for teaming up and working together was a nice change
of pace.
A suggestion:
Would be nice if it were harder to knock your own teammate down - but maybe
this is a balancing thing that you might have to experiment around with. Or
maybe this is a good feature - not sure yet, will take more playthroughs :-)
* Knock-out - This was interesting! We played a couple times, I think there
were some issues where some players could get knocked out easily, but other
players just wouldn't get knocked down even though we were going directly at
them. It seems this player was doing this: using right arrow keys to move
around, then just spamming "shift" while running, and basically he was
invincible. Overall this is a fun game mode.
Suggestions:
* I think getting in the van was disabled in this mode, but there is still a UI to press
space to get in the van when getting close. Might want to remove.
* Maybe when a player gets knocked down they can be re-spawned at van? That
way they have some breathing room until they get back into the action.
Otherwise it was kind of a dash spam fest :-)
Okay, overall it was great and I'm looking forward to playing this at more of our game nights!!!
Here are some high-level observations and suggestions:
* Being able to stack multiple gadgets/power-ups of the same type is a bit OP.
For example, you could stack all earthquakes - then at the end of the game
just spam earthquake for a while preventing players from reaching the van,
since each gadget slot has its own cool-down timer. If you have enough
money, you can just keep spamming for a long time which kind of ruins it for
the other players because they are constantly getting earthquaked :-)
* There is kind of a game-breaking infinite money glitch one player discovered.
If they stack 4 "statue" gadgets, then in the game, they just wait for players
to leave then spawn 4 statues near van. They stack them up, then turn them
in. They get multipliers in money for stacking, which turns out to be MORE
than it costs to purchase a new statue powerups. So they could keep doing
this basically increasing their money over and over without having
to do much :-P Kind of an infinite money glitch.
* Might be cool to have an option where you can't see how much money each
person is making. Maybe some server options for this type of thing, similar
to Among Us server options, where you can tweak rules of the game.
Okay, we found some bugs, listing below!
* After playing a bunch of free-for-all, we started a new team game and the
colors underneath didn't match the teams (seems like each person still had
unique colors, couldn't tell which team we were on). On the next team game
it seemed like it was fixed.
* Sometimes there was a glitch where we couldn't get into the van.
* Also there was a glitch on one of the games (it may have been teams) where we
were all in van at the end of the level, but the level didn't end. Not sure
what triggered this, I know someone placed revolving windows in the van area
at the end.
* Sometimes items would drop from the stack even when stacked well. This
usually happened when there was a lot of chaos around. I'm not sure if
another player was trying to steal or not, so may have been that.
* When one person quits to go to lobby, and then re-enters the
already-in-progress game, it seems their colors are messed up. Trying a team
game then has messed up colors too.
* At one point, one of the players got stuck in the walls and couldn't get out.
* Sometimes it seems that other player's lay down/stand up animations are
reversed. They would be sliding all over the floor while walking, and when
knocked down their character would go into standing position. They couldn't
see this from their own view, just from other's views.
* One player could not change gadgets by clicking icons on bottom left while in
the lobby area.
* Money in lobby seemed to stay in inventory when starting new game.
Bugs are expected since Alpha, so thought I would point out everything we noticed!
Thanks again for inviting us to play, looking forward to next update! This is a great
party game.