I managed to finish the game (or rather, finish the boss fight) and I’d say it was pretty good, if not for the bugs.
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The idea of the game is pretty good, I haven’t played any games with ship combat before this and got the hang of it pretty quickly. I do think there should be the same camera controls in both the map and combat though, since it felt a bit weird to have to adjust to an automatic camera. It would also make the play area and boss a bit easier to find (I spent some time roaming around and found a lot of inconsistent clipping, by the way). I really liked the gameplay loop overall, even if it went by pretty quickly.
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Since I mentioned a bug, there were a few. For one, level 3 ships spawn below the sea level in combat, so I couldn’t hit them with my level 1 ship and had to force close and restart the game (there’s no Esc to pause/exit, which is a bit sad). Also, I managed to get to the boss fight, but the things that spawned weren’t even ships. They did have small hitboxes, though, so I was able to destroy them and find out that there isn’t anything to do once you finish.
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There were no cues (visual or auditory) for any of the things that seemed like they had a cooldown or limited uses (ship flipping in the map or normal/cursed bombs). While for normal bombs, I was able to kind of learn the timing, I still have no idea when I can or can’t use the cursed bombs or flip the ship. This is technically just polish, but it could’ve been at least mentioned on the game page or something.
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I have to commend the music, the sounds and the graphics, though. If you did all those by yourself, you did a pretty good job.
All in all, nice idea and an okay execution that could turn into something really good if it was simply more polished. As a tech demo, I see the promise in this, because the base gameplay felt quite satisfying when it worked well.