DAMN even on my second try, only got a C overall (B-C-C, C overall).
First of all, “I was wrong” - “team re-unites” lmao I love the newspapers at the end. Didn’t notice if they changed based on my grade but they gave me a good chuckle. Violence is indeed the answer.
I think my only real minor issue in this game was that it felt like swapping came out a little slower than I expected, leading to some fumbling. Some kind of input queueing on the swap might have been useful, like shift + X during the swap = queued up attack or something.
This is also likely a skill issue on my part, but there were quite a few buttons in this game, felt like a high learning curve. There were quite a few moments in my first run where I’d be fumbling to remember which button was the dodge key (usually I’d just swap by accident and get hit lol). Feels like the ‘takedown’ button could have been baked into the basic attack button instead, not sure when I’d want to do a basic attack over a takedown if available.
I really liked the stagger-on-perfect-dodge mechanic. I initially played super passive on my first run, dodging really early and getting hits in here and there and ended up with a D due to how much longer the fights took. On my second run, I went for perfect dodges and was really happy with how rewarded I was for it. Really awesome stuff.
I really love the ‘block = kick’ mechanic, where you need to kick to break a block, but you can’t just spam kicks. This goes into a design I wish more games did, which is ‘pattern-recognition-as-offense’. Most boss fights in games only use ‘pattern-recognition-as-defense’, where you watch for enemy patterns, recognize them, and then respond with dodges/spacing/parrying/etc.
Not as many games do ‘pattern-recognition-as-offense’, where you have to use a specific offensive tool to respond to a specific pattern. In your case, it’s “blue vfx = guard = I need to kick exactly once”. Seems simple, but just having that one mechanic in the game adds so much depth. I think the entire ‘pattern-recognition-as-offense’ genre is untapped, and I love how your game uses it. Really awesome work!