Odenk

Hi. We’re students from the south of France reviewing games for a workshop in Game User Research with the help of a User Research Professional from Ubisoft. We found your request for feedback and got some of our classmates to play your game (some of them are veterans of the survivor Genre, others compleeetely new). Here’s our feedback we hope it is useful to you in any way ^^ :

The game was really fun to play for everyone, even for those who had no previous experience with this kind of game.

the overall experience is really satisfying, the game feel is great, the floaty jumps and the aerial control really felt like playing A doom like / ultrakill / RoR 2
Every playtester tried multiple runs and wanted to play more of it, even if they died really early in the game. Some said it was “addictive”.

On the other hand, there are various things they didn’t understand or had a difficult time with :

Camera	CAMERA is frustrating to players when it collides and bounces off trees and other elements of the environment. Crosshair is difficult to see with the enemies on screen + not aligned with camera (makes it harder to aim)
Visibility	Lifebars overlap and hide everything going from gifts to other enemy types which makes it difficult to tell what some enemies do (due to the fact that we can’t see them)
Balancing	Arrivée des ennemis pas échelonné (beaucoup d’un coup, pas de variations -> très linéaire) Enemy spawn rate is really high and new players are often overwhelmed by the enemies and dont have the time to adapt / react (there is no visible variations in the spawn rate)
Rythm	Time (rest time) between difficulty levels is often too fast and hard to follow
Understanding	Some players needed more time to understand were the life bar was
Feedback	Players complained about the lack of feedback when taking damage and when leveling up. Here are some recommendations if you are interested : When taking damage the player will feel more pressure and become more engaged gameplay-wise when receiving damage - try to make the player “fear” taking damage when Leveling up, make a satisfying SFX or/and Animation and you will give the players a reason to keep playing (ex. 20 minutes till dawn does this great by adding a good sfx with a simple animation making leveling up more satisfying)
Objectives	It is hard to understand when the game ends and it can reduce the feeling of satisfaction as the player doesn't know what they’re evolving their character for. Maybe try defining clear objectives for the player to help motivate them and play more of your game.
Level design	We’re not sure if you have other thing planned for the level design (like other levels or open maps), but a small issue with the current map is that it is waaaaay too small for the amount of enemies spawning (becomes impossible to navigate arround 14:00)

In conclusion, your game was a great discovery. We had fun testing and playing it. One of our players managed to win the game in 27 minutes. The other ones played several runs and we mostly stopped because we were still in the workshop.

One of the main reasons people would stop playing is probably the optimisation/performance issues and the “readability” of the game

but we would still recommend the game because it IS FUN, and we all enjoyed playing it!

BONUS : Some games that are quite similar to yours, if you dont know them it may be interesting for you to check them out !

Risk Of Rain 2
20 minutes till dawn
Vampire survivors
Deeprock galactic survivor