TL:DR It feels like a resource game where the resource is not my energy, health, or stamina, but my patience.
I will go through the pros first, because there are things I like about this game, but the cons are gonna be far more extensive. I adore everything visually going on with the game. The icon for an attack coming that has to be parried is great (though I will talk about parrying more when I talk about combat loop).
Also a few areas you fight in feel nice for the kinds of fights they are. Foggy bridge fight is nice, but the boss rushing at you from the fog is a great use of it, and more of that would’ve been what I wanted to see. I also like that, when you go to the menu, you are squared up against the boss. That’s some visual fun.
I hate to say that’s where pros end but I have more on the negative side to say about the game, from a variety of angles. This is going to be primarily for the dev, and I am trying to be as constructive as I can with all of this. Cool? Cool.
Having no keybind options really hurts what the game can feel like, and I wanna explain why with the biggest outlier of the issue with the parry. For context, I am on keyboard, maybe this is just fine on controller. I have to stop moving to the right to hit the key that allows me to parry, and due to how key it is to the overall gameplay loop, I am perpetually strafing to the left. Then, I can’t interrupt other actions to parry. So it’s not just that I have to stop moving to the right entirely, but I also can’t be reloading (which I will talk about more when I talk about heat) or meleeing, or even shooting sometimes. So if I want to parry, I have to stop everything, which is certainly not the intention of the gameplay. But hey, I could dodge! Until you get to a boss where the room explodes if you don’t parry his attack, even if you are outside the range of his attack from the throw or dodge. If it wasn’t for the fact that the bridge boss has a OHKO shotgun, I wouldn’t be moving. I don’t think that's a good design. As another point, the parry windows feel so random. I think a key design missing here is equidistant spacing for parry windows that you break sometimes for the sake of variety, because right now it feels like every attack was given a parry window that felt like guess work more than intentional placement. (I think it’s tied to the literal hitboxes of enemy weapons, which is fine, but their movement plus player movement can be so sporadic that you don’t actually know if you’ll be hit by the start or end of a swing. Again, another reason to stand still, because maybe it’ll be more consistent then.) ((No many of them are not just weapon issues, the timing just makes no sense, and it’s not fun to just be frustrated with weapon swings with no rhythm or reason to them))
I think the solution to a lot of this is allowing the indicated attacks to be guaranteed to ‘connect’ and force the parry out of the player, while allowing other attacks to actually be dodged without exploding the room. I also think those indicators should probably have similar parry window timings, especially when they are on the same boss. The same boss decides it’ll attack me within frames of the indicator pop up because I am moving but will take their sweet time when I stand perfectly still… doesn’t feel good. This would also make the bosses that you cannot see because of fire effects, or because they make your entire screen ‘ff0000’ red, more fair to fight. If there is an audio queue that tells me an attack I need to parry is incoming, and the timing on these parries is actually consistent, then I can learn that’s what I need to do. If I can’t see the boss from clutter or blindness, and I can’t even counter it, I may as well restart. Right now the indicated attacks miss more often than they hit, too, so it is just annoying to have the marker on my screen when it means nothing 90% of the time.
On the enemy that makes the room explode, get rid of his double flip attack. You cannot parry both and it’s a guaranteed room explosion you just can’t avoid. Or just make it considered one attack, so if I parry it I don’t just suffer for doing what I was supposed to do. Same for the phase 2 room explosion, but in your face. Instakill attacks from bosses just aren’t fun and definitely don’t have a place in a game like this, on NORMAL.
Heat… I think there are flaws with the system as it currently is, but maybe they are able to be changed. For starters, automatic ‘reload’ to drop the heat is a bad idea. If a boss has a flurry of 4-5 attacks and I wanna parry all of them while getting damage in with shooting, I’m boned. After the second parry and one shot from my gun, I start my automatic reload and cannot do a thing. I cannot attack, parry, or melee. I know it’s a quick reload, but wanting to get chip damage when you have a window of time to shoot but not melee, and being punished for it, isn’t great. A lot of the player’s dps comes from high heat melee attacks, which honestly makes me wonder why shooting is in here to begin with, or why it’s so punishing to use when the benefit is chip damage that ultimately hurts you so much more. I shouldn't be fighting against the mechanics of the game to get to the point of having fun.
