Laedomanes

Laedomanes has some great visual design coupled with music that pairs perfectly however there are some odd design choices here and there. EDIT: Since this review, the dev has updated the game and pretty much fixed all the issues I had with Wall jumping. It feels 10x better now and flows really well. They also included an on-screen indicator for the objectives which also fixed that issue i had too. Insane response time from a clearly passionate dev TL;DR - Decent enough gameplay, visual+sound design is great, short campaign, playtime depends on how much you like the base gameplay and enjoy running procedurally generated levels. Okay for the price. Firstly, I personally find the movement of the character to be quite enjoyable, the running speed and feel is good however walljumps feels completely weird. You lose nearly all momentum from doing one and you seem to have to be jumping at a 45 degree angle against the wall for it to be registered/worth anything? It's slightly confusing and they feel quite bad to do, however chaining 2/3 wall jumps against 2 different walls feels good (for some reason I can't pinpoint). The teleporters and slides in the levels are a nice addition, albeit a small one, but a positive still. The levels in the (very short) campaign are ok, with them presenting some good design, however the main, BIG, issue i have with the pre-designed levels is that the placement of most of the objectives makes no sense what-so-ever. Mainly, the fact that you'll get to one objective, then the next one will be BEHIND you instead of IN FRONT, or in an area where you can barely spot it, meaning that you end up getting to the objective, then instantly looking straight up towards the sky and doing a 360 to try and spot the light beam for it instead. This could easily be remedied by just placing an arrow on the player's screen pointing to the new objective, or another UI icon to show it. I also have zero clue on what the large towers are supposed to do (although this may just be me being stupid). I understand there's a video for them in the tutorial but that didn't really explain much to me about them. Jumping on enemies is also an issue because it magnetizes your character to the enemy, and completely kills all your momentum, and 99% of the time you will have jumped on an enemy by accident, not on purpose, as most of the enemies serve no danger to you (except for the big hovering balls and the spinning lasers). I like the idea of procedurally-generated levels but haven't played much of that mode yet so can't comment on how "procedural" and random it is, but again, I can see them being a pain to play with the objective placement also being random on these levels, and without having an indicator on the HUD showing me the direction of the next objective. I'm also wondering, why in a game based around speed and parkour, there isn't an in-game timer so that you can record your best times and try to beat them? For the cheap price it's at I would say it's an ok way to kill an hour or two. The campaign will run you a very short time though, about 30 minutes so your mileage depends on how much you like the base gameplay and enjoy running the procedurally-generated "trials" (Which do use a seed system as far as I know, meaning you can re-run the same one over and over to improve your time if you want to) The developer also seems to be very responsive to feedback, as can be seen in the update on February 11th, which fixed some issues another player had posted in his review just 1 day before.