This game was pretty fun, and also fairly easy to understand. And the enemies, projectiles and everything were easy to see while still having a somewhat detailed background. If there’s one thing I didn’t understand at first, it was the one about how to get from each level to the next one after clearing it.
Nineties: Non-scrolling 2D might seem a bit dated, but with rotating sprites, a bit of scaling and the realistic backgrounds that almost seem like what you’d see in a 32-bit PC game. (And at the risk of getting into personal preferences, I think I like that the background doesn’t spin around, because spinning backgrounds can be a bit disorienting at times). The music also has some nice nineties vibes to it. The colours feel like they might be better than what I think of as nineties, but arcade games could look better than console ones, so I think that’s fine.
Fun: I beat this game twice and could have beaten it a third time if I didn’t decide that my time was better spent playing more entries so that I could comment on those too. So I think I can say I liked it (there’s several entries in this jam I didn’t manage to beat before deciding I should continue playing other entries). Well, I guess that could also mean this one was sorta easy (especially when you realise you can move backwards). I think the audio might be helping the game be fun, and I think that’s nice.
Sound: So I listened to the title screen. It was nice. It fit the setting and the nineties theme. I also noticed that it didn’t loop (not that it should necessarily start over when it ended, I think it should do something else, but more about that in the UI section). And it might have been a bit slow if you intended for it to sound arcade-y.
I like the in-game music and the sound effects too.
Graphics: fairly good. I can see all the things I need to, and they look pretty too. The colour palette also makes everything fit nicely together and makes it look spacey.
Fun: The game was pretty fun to play. I already beat it yesterday and yet it was still fun to play it again today when listening to the audio.
UI: I like the arcade reference with “Free Play” and “Insert Quarter. Not that you went all the way on the arcade visual style though (in an arcade game, I would have expected to see the game “play itself” in attract mode, to show what the gameplay is like).
The instructions fading out seems a bit unnecessary: it could just have stayed on screen until the player left the level. But they do stay on screen for plenty of time, although as they fade out they slowly get harder to read.
Marketing: The game is simple enough that it doesn’t need a long description, but I think it wouldn’t have hurt to mention the controls there. The game itself does show the controls at the start, but if you want to re-read them later, the only way to do so is to reload the page and start over.
Also, while you have tags for things like the genre, I think there’s some setting you could use so that the link to the source code can appear in the “More information” section.
The logo that I see on the list of submissions seems to hint well at the artstyle and setting, and with the logline “Top-down shooter written in JavaScript” I had a clue roughly what to expect, and it did meet my expectations and was fun to play. And it even hinted at the fact that it was playable in-browser, which if I weren’t trying to play all entries would probably have made this one of the games I played anyway.