I have seen solo dev free games more well-made than this crap. This is just a lazy arena style shooter where you get locked into mini areas you trigger, and you have to clear all waves before you can move on, like Doom 2016 or Serious Sam. NOTHING about this game is like 90s shooters, especially its gameplay. What a scam.
Every single arena encounter is super easy and boring, and then the final boss fight is just absolutely tedious and difficult in a non-good way. You have to spam the dash button and hop over the the pits because the boss runs max speed and keeps spamming explosive projectiles at you. The boss's 2nd wave is just summoning enemies around you.
And speaking of enemies, the variety and design are just... bad... The only good enemy designs are probably the red ranged enemy and the big purple melee enemy that turns red after taking enough damage.
Your arsenal sucks in general. All guns have unlimited ammo, require reloads after shooting a certain a number of shots, and we have wayyyy too many weapons for such a short game. Their order is absolutely questionable for a game of this type. This game SHOULD have a UI that indicates which slot has which weapon, so these weapons can be in the appropriate slot, like the sword should have been in the 1st slot!
Here are the weapons in order:
1. As a pistol in this type of games, it works very well until you get the machine gun. It would have been a lot more interesting if it was also in full-auto like the real-life counterpart (Chinese Type 80 pistol, an interesting addition),
2. The shotgun is absolutely dogsh@t. Massive spread, not a lot of damage for a shotgun, and unsatisfying to use in general.
3. The sword is almost useless because it has not high enough damage, and every gun we get has unlimited ammo.
4. The machine gun has less damage than the pistol, holds 69 rounds (yeah, funny number), gets more inaccurate after the first shot, and shoots at a low rate of fire. It would have been decent if the single-shot rifle and the grenade launcher were not so OP.
5. The single-shot rifle is OP, rendering everything else useless, except for the grenade launcher.
6. The grenade launcher is OP, rendering everything else useless, except for the single-shot rifle.
For a game this small, a lot can be done to improve it.
First thing to do is to get rid of the clickbait description - "'90s gameplay".
Next, tone down the bloom effect.
Next, add more levels to slowly introduce the player this many weapons and enemy types or have less weapons if the game only has this many level (this game only has 2 levels).
Arenas can be fun, but it's overdone to the point it's boring in this game. Add variety to the arenas to make the game more interesting, especially massive arenas and arenas with more elevation.
About the weapons, the pistol could have been a lot more useful if it was the only gun that has unlimited ammo. Another way to make it better is to have more levels for the players to use the pistol before it gets replaced by the machine gun in the later, more challenging levels. It also means that the weapon slot where the pistol belongs to becomes the slot for the machine gun, like it's an upgrade. The shotgun should have higher damage or tighter spread. The sword should have higher damage for both attacks and/or longer range for its secondary attack to actually be useful. The single-shot rifle should have slower reload and massive recoil if its damage value is kept unchanged. The grenade launcher should have an arc-shaped trajectory like an actual grenade launcher, slightly larger blast radius, and slightly less damage to be more fun and balanced.
The enemies can definitely be improved, especially the ranged enemies. They are so easy to kill and give you barely any fun challenge. The green ranged enemies could have been tankier, dealt more damage, and appeared in a lot less number. The blue ranged enemy could have been removed or redesigned to look more like some kind of magical turret in the name of variety. Some ranged enemies should get their own flavor of projectiles like shooting 3 at once, arc-shaped trajectory projectiles, or hitscan laser that has visual cue to alert the players so they can have enough time to dodge.
The final boss is the worst thing I have ever seen. It should have slower default speed and only runs at very high speed after playing a visual and audio cues, which would be the moment when the players have to utilize the dash button to avoid getting slashed by it.
Wanna have some fun? Find the classic Doom community and ask them for recommendation. There's plenty of fun retro singleplayer gaming experience that doesn't cost any money. You can download Freedoom and Freedoom 2 to play classic Doom games for free, install community-made mods that are essentially brand new games, or download standalone Doom mods. Just go and ask the classic Doom community for good retro shooters that are free. ALSO, most of these don't require powerful hardware to run like Cryptis.
