Played this game for about and hour, and for a free demo, it has TONS of potential!! I do have some thoughts on it, though, and I will preface these thoughts by saying I am NOT a shooter player. I am not good at shooters, and I do not play shooters often, so take everything I say here with a grain of salt! These are the thoughts of a casual player:
PROS (things I liked!):
- I am absolutely in love with the art style! Very pop-y, very stylized, very cool!
- I found the occasional characters you talk to to be surprisingly endearing! I can't remember any of their names, as there is no story (yet) to make me care about them, but I like them! I think they're funny! I also think the character designs are fun!
- I love, love, LOVE the sort of dungeoneering-type gameplay! Going through different rooms with different obstacles and builds is a really cool concept, and I would love to see it expanded upon! A randomly-generated dungeon gauntlet sounds like fun...
- Gameplay is fun! You weren't kidding about the speed thing, I like running around!
CONS (things I think can be improved!):
- I could only get this game to run half-decently at the lowest possible settings. I will admit, my computer isn't the greatest, but it's no laptop or an old hunk of metal. I feel like graphics could be optimized better.
- The jumping off walls mechanic is completely broken. You can almost mountaineer any wall, at any time, which would be perfectly fine if you were rewarded for thinking outside of the box and using this mechanic to launch yourself through entire rooms, but that's not the case. In a game where you need to kill every enemy in a room in order to move on, it just feels... restrictive.
- Furthermore, the jumping is just plain insane. Parkouring across tiny little ledges is virtually impossible for the speed. I got stuck for so long on the tutorial for this reason alone, and it didn't get better later on. Overall, the jump strength would benefit from just being... weaker.
- The enemies are far too difficult. Like I said, I am a very casual player, but sometimes their mechanics just seem downright unfair. They take far too many bullets to kill with any weapon, they are constantly faster than you, they have an unreasonable range for their attacks despite being no where near you, they come in large hoards that make getting away from them with enough health impossible sometimes, and they spawn in the most unfair of places. In one dungeon, they spawn directly behind you when you fall through the floor, not even giving you a chance to get your bearings, and in another, they spawn literally on top of you, which is unfair for any skill level of player.
- I have tried to use every weapon in the game, and I've found that only one is worth using: the machine gun. Every other weapon is too slow for the barrage of enemies constantly chasing you with more speed than you can fire. With the range and constant speed you can get with the machine gun alone, it makes every other weapon obsolete, which is restrictive in a shooter game, where you should confidently be able to choose a weapon you enjoy using, instead of having just a single viable option.
- Speaking of weapons, the weapon switching mechanic is... not my favorite. The weapon switching seems a little counter-intuitive, with you not being able to revolve your weapons with the scroll wheel, and instead having to remember where your weapons are in your inventory, and not being able to roll from the last to first weapon. Just seems a little illogical, pretty annoying.
- Just in general, picking up health should give you more health than it does. With your health draining through rooms of merciless enemies, you could clear out a whole room and only recover about 30 health, and it really doesn't need to be that brutal, especially since you don't regain health from checkpoints.
FINAL THOUGHTS: Like I said, this has the potential to be an EXCELLENT game, and I can reasonably see this becoming very popular, especially with multiplayer! All in all, we have to remember that this is a bangin' good demo, and that it has some kinks that will be worked out in the future! In the state it is in now, I'd give it about a 5/10 overall, but I cannot WAIT to see where this goes, and I look forward to seeing it grow! I genuinely recommend this game for anyone looking for an up-and-coming shooter, so that maybe, you too can be as excited for its progress as I am!