ENTROPOLY

My brother showed me this game, and the SECOND I saw "Native GCC" flash across the screen I IMMEDIATELY knew this was going to be my jam. I love melee, I love melee movement, and this game is that movement component crystallised with a slipperiness added to it that takes a little getting used to for it to become more natural. I wrote this for other Smash Melee / P+ nerds, so please excuse the terminology for move names. The character feels like it's built on Fox as the base for "weight" and jump heights, Marth's ground traction, with Ness' aerials and P+ Lucario's up B. The character's moveset is fast and punchy for the most part, with some fast moves like upair and lingering ones like nair and fair/bair that have a wind up and extended hitbox that make them really fun to land, but with the fact that you have access to a shine that is very forgiving to multishine with (I can semi-consistently do 3 where in melee I can't/haven't tried) and the extra horizontal momentum/low traction both in air and on ground makes it feel like there's no point to using grounded moves. To that end, most of the moveset feels like it's there sort of like a vestigial organ, like it's kinda chained to its love of melee in a sense? I don't necessarily want them GONE, but I feel like the fact that there are "smash attacks" but they don't offer any advantage. alongside and the laggy as hell dash attack makes it feel like half of the moveset is just a reason to restart a run rather than having a purpose. I would want to see some advantage to them that made them interesting to route around, like making smash attacks count for multiple hits or something? uair and shine are amazing on their own so far, with fair and bair being thrown in now and then for their spacing depending on the arc/momentum of certain jumps and a smattering of nair. I've finished the first "world" at time of writing this with all the base and hard levels completed and managed a couple of S completions while I was working through it, and I can confidently say I love this little thing. Excellent visual vibes; it's pretty abstract, but like, it conveys what I'm trying to do neatly and for the most part I think it's pretty much the platonic ideal. It doesn't make any sense, and who cares; it's about the movement. Certain elements like the breakaway platforms being cartoonishly mario adjacent are distracting thematically, but they stand out neatly and make it easy to identify their current state (i.e. their breaking animation vs broken vs normal). In some spots the wobbling of the kill surfaces makes it harder to tell where EXACTLY you'll die if you touch them, but I'm not going to chase times high enough on the boards for that specific knowledge to be useful to me. Music is jammin, hunting times is fun, and I'm looking forward to what the rest of this game has to offer!