Nice fast-paced, high-tension top-down shooter.
PROS:
- It starts nice and simple to let me get into the controls and gameplay, but has a nice escalation/power curve as I complete the gameplay loop so I definitely feel the power gains as a player.
- The enemy variety is nice to give different expressions of threats and lets you scale up the difficulty as the game plays out.
- I appreciated the rotating top of the sprite to better represent the orientation of my character's aim when there was a lot on screen. It just gets easy to lose the mouse in those scenarios and that helped at least a little bit.
CRITIQUE/SUGGESTIONS:
- Everything moves pretty fast right now, especially the projectiles from the purple enemies. It makes for higher tension as you go, but also makes introducing the new enemies a significant jump since dodging the projectiles and the extra fast dudes is a much bigger deal than the base enemies. You might try slowing the purple projectiles and the base enemies down and then INCREASING the speed of the red enemies to give you more of a difficulty curve and things get extra real when the red guys show up.
- Would be nice to have some kind of secondary objective other than just collect X number of the things to win. Things like pickups that could be blueprints for the different guns you can build or temporary buffs like speed boosts or double projectiles would vary up the experience more and make more small points of interest to discover.
- Not sure if it's already happening, but having different tiles of the terrain affect your movement somehow would make movement choices more engaging and also be a vector for mech scaling or pickups (extra engine power to push through tough terrain for example).