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(1 edit)

Hey!
I streamed your game last night. Overall, I think the game looks promising, but yes, it is indeed quite clearly an early build.

First, to begin with technical aspects of the game, it had several crashes. The game's frame timing and performance seems fine, but the overall stability seems to be quite rough. I crashed twice while waiting in the menus, and then another crash near the end of my run with the game. (since it seems you are collecting hardware info, I will post it at the bottom of this review - sorry for the wall of text!)
An additional annoyance is the requirement to connect to a server in order to play. For my own streams I often download the games I will play in advance, this became a nuisance because it wouldn't let me play unless I had the latest version, but updating to the latest version still resulted in an empty lobby of no other games, making the whole ordeal just sort of feel like a waste of time. I'm aware you recommend using Itch's client to resolve this issue. For marketing purposes, I would recommend just having a "Play Single Player" button front and center at the title screen. Even if its functionality is exactly the same as "creating a lobby", at least those whom wish to try your game aren't immediately turned away when the see empty lobbies, and hopefully it would bypass the requirement to re-download the game.

Now, to move on to game itself:
The graphics are nice, with a clear and clean aesthetic to them. I was surprised to see that this was a Unity game. While I am aware Unity's lightning can look nice (especially if you use the HDRP) often out-of-the-box Unity looks dull and flat, so this tells me care was put into the rendering of the game.
Combat is rough in my opinion. I'm typically not a fan of rogue-lite games, but actually I didn't find them too horribly intrusive here. What I did find obtrusive were enemies. Enemies were way too damage sponge-y, and the optimal tactic often boiled down to kiting them in a circle. Movement, dodging, and shooting never offered the sense of feeling powerful or getting a leg up on the enemies, it just felt like mindless repetition with enemies that take way too many shots to down. All of this mindless repetitious of: run backwards while shooting, grapple to get a lead on the enemies, repeat - was made all the worse with the lifelessness of no soundtrack and no ambience. While I am aware this is an early build, it's also a public build released to garner attention, and so I think you are doing yourself a huge disservice by not including, at the very least, placeholder royalty free soundtracks - there's good stuff out there for free or cheap, so don't hinder your game so much! (You're also welcome to use my own music, though it wouldn't fit your game 🤣)


The best part going for this game is the graphics, and to a lesser extent the mild RPG/rogue-like elements. I can only hope that you don't lean in the direction most rogue-lites go where you start feeling gimped and, with luck, maybe you will build up to feeling mildly competent. It would be refreshing to have a game start with the player feeling competent and building up to feeling powerful.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.

Here are the hardware specs:
Win10
Ryzen 2700x
GTX1080Ti
16GB RAM


edit & p.s.
Itch's comment section is just heinous with the amount of spam. Glad to see you cleaned it up, but I'm sure it's an ongoing battle.

Hey Nolan,


Thank you so much for taking the time to write such an amazing feedback! 

As the Creative Director of the game, let me address some of your concerns :)

First about the tech issues, yes we're aware of those. We did what we could to fix a lot of them before our holiday break, unfortunately some issues got through the cracks, some crashes, disconnects and visual glitches. We will be back early next year and we'll promptly work on fixing as much issues as we can.

About the game being always online, it's not really as simple as just pressing a button :/ The game as it stands assumes the player is always connected. We had to make this choice because developing a single-player experience and a multiplayer at the same time is effectively like developing two games at once and our team is SUPER small (we're currently less than 10 people!). So in order for us to deliver a good experience we decided to focus on multiplayer and making that feel great (although a bit buggy right now, sorry). A single-player 100% offline mode is not out of the picture tho, and we may work on that later on during development, I just cannot make a promise that this will be a thing :/


We are working on private lobbies and a better single player experience, tho :)

About the graphics: yes, our art team is amazing and we've taken the hard path of customizing Unity's rendering.. by A LOT. And it's not over, we'll keep customizing the rendering as we develop the game to make the game even prettier.


I really like and respect your comments about the combat and it's something we've been discussing internally, things like ways we can make the combat a more defend/attack or push and pull, introduce more variety and more interesting decisions. You can expect A LOT of improvements on that front as we develop the game, especially early next year. This is a priority for us, making sure the combat is great and the game feels amazing to play and you feel stronger as you progress.

About OST. We're currently in the process of rewriting our entire sound engine from scratch, this is the main reason there's no music in the game yet. Work on OST and SFX will be ongoing and as soon as we release an update with the new sound engine, we'll remix the entire game, add more sound effects and a soundtrack.


Will definitely watch you playing later :)

Feel free to join our discord.gg/bitcake to interact with me and the rest of the team and learn what's coming to the game! :)

PS: Yeah, we've been monitoring this comment section a LOT to delete those pesky bots.