First off, I really enjoyed this game.
Having only little control over when your guns fire adds another dimension of planning to a top-down shooter and makes positioning even more important. I love the spin this mechanic takes on regular tds games, in which you often default to a single weapon once you find your favourite.
The thematics are great and make for an interesting game world and enemy design.
The weapon design was very interesting as well. Some notes on that:
- I love the design of the minigun, impairing/speeding up your movement while dealing damage at a medium range made it the most fun weapon for me.
- Having the ability to create escape/attack routes for yourself with the rocket launcher is also a great concept. However, I think it should not be the only weapon able to destroy smaller obstacles like crates/tables as right now it is necessary to always switch to the launcher and even damage yourself when in a tight spot. Having it be the only gun to tear down walls perfectly makes sense, though.
- The flamethrower works great when running away from a horde of enemies but it is useless as an offensive tool as you constantly run into your own flames. Maybe tweak it so that while the gun is firing, you push away the flames in front of you as you walk.
- The shotgun works fine, although it felt a little like an inferior version of the minigun. Maybe reduce its cooldown timer so that it can serve as a quickdraw close-range combat tool and/or make it further push away enemies hit.
- The only weapon I did not like at all was the poison grenade launcher. Most of the combat is close to medium range (except when you know the position of an enemy far away and decide to fire a rocket at them), so having a weapon that only works at a huge distance is problematic. Add in that the flask needs to bounce before it explodes & only creates a very little smoke cloud and you have an inferior weapon. This could be fixed in a number of ways e.g. making the flask explode once it hits an enemy, decreasing its range/bounces, increasing the cloud size or making the cloud interactable with your other guns e.g. the shotgun blast spreading it further, the flamethrower making it explode, etc.
I mentioned earlier that I like how the game encourages you to use all the weapons as it is too slow to cycle back to your favourite. This necessitates, however, that all weapons are (somewhat) equally useful.
Tweaking the weaker ones a little bit would probably solve that, though.
As the level structure and enemy spawns change every time you play, this never really gets boring and makes for a lot of replayability.
Tldr:
+ Great idea for a core mechanic, switching things up for a TDS game
+ Cool thematics
+ Great design on some weapons (e.g. the minigun, rocket launcher)
+ Fun and interesting gameplay
+ Replayability due to randomized levels
- Some weapons need to be improved to fully support the core mechanic of semi-controllability
Thanks for making this, I had a lot of fun trying it out!
______________________________________________________________________________________
Due to this is being jam game, of course there were a few bugs/unintended features. I am just listing them in case they are not known. Therefore, they are not intended as criticism towards the design:
- Outer walls of the level can occasionally be destroyed with the rocket launcher. This allows the player to exit the level into the void. As the tight space is part of the game mechanics, this makes it very easy to win.
- Corn projectiles are invisible from time to time, especially at close range.
- It happened several times that all enemies were dead but the victory screen did not appear. I searched the whole level multiple times but could not find any more. As enemies sometimes come in from outside the level it could be that that they spawned out of bounds and maybe wandered off.
- Enemies tend to walk through walls sometimes
Viewing post in Ratatatatouille jam comments
First of all, we are literally screaming right now. This is the most genuine review for a game, especially on itch.io we've ever read. And your timing is perfect! We're actually working right now on improvements for our game and your ideas will flow right into them.
Your feedback is very valuable for us and we are beyond happy that you enjoyed our game this much!
W can tell you we already tweaked the weapons, we reduced the cooldown for the shotgun and made the gas grenade more useful (we're totally with you here, it was the worst weapon of them all).
Also thanks for your bug list! We didn't know that the protectiles of the corn were invisible at times. It's supposed to shoot popcorn but we somehow forgot to implement it.. oops! Concerning the enemies.. some of them get out of the level and can't find their way back to the player. So you probably didn't kill them all, we just messed ab the path finding there..
We want to thank you again and we appreciate the time and effort you put in actually playing and reviewing our game to this extend!