Warcat Parade

Much of the critical problem has been addressed and it's fairly balanced and fun to play now! I changed my review to positive, thank you! --- Cute artstyle, well made stage enemy designs, and the game has become a fair challenge for both characters now. Although bombs are still super strong and now you get more of them, you can spam them if you have trouble with certain bosses, which is kind of sad. [h2] --- previous review --- [/h2] I liked the game to a certain degree, it's just that there are certain flaws that outweighs the positive sides which makes it hard for me to recommend to others right now. Cute artstyle, well made stage enemy designs and fun to play, but every other things in this game is poorly balanced from your character shots, boss patterns, and even music volumes. Typical touhou-cave type of bullet hell shmups, but each boss has around 6 patterns even from Stage 1, each pattern taking 30 seconds ~ 1 minute to kill using the White Cat. Black Cat on the other hand can speed kill almost everything in the game since it has 4~5 times more firepower than the White Cat. Dodging the endless boss attacks while the music breaking my ears was quite an experience. At least Black Cat can solve many of the problems. [h3] Current problems [/h3] - [strike] The game won't boot from the Steam client. You need to manually startup the EXE from the installed folder to even play the game. [/strike] => fixed! - Abysmal player shot balance => [strike] Black Cat does literally 5 times more damage than White [/strike] => [strike]White Cat takes 30 seconds ~ 1 minutes per boss patterns, stages get's harder to navigate since nothing dies later on [/strike] => fixed! => Keyboard players never being able to align the Black Cat's shot straight, but only left or right. Only the controller players (analogue stick) are able to align the shot straight. - [strike] Horrendous balance of boss attack patterns [/strike] => Stage 1 boss already has 6 patterns, the 3rd one being the most difficult in the game => Stage 3 boss has a ginormous health value compared to other bosses in the entire game, which takes eons to kill even with Black Cat. - Unequal music loudness per stage => Stage 1 being quite low, Stage 2 and onward being super loud => Stage clear jingle exploding your ears even if you lower the in-game music/SFX volume to the lowest, it will always play with the loudest volume available. - Extend value discrepancy between the manual and in-game behavior => After 1,000,000 points you only extend with 500,000 points but is never mentioned in the manual. The manual says that it extends every 100,000 points. - [strike] Achievements not working at all [/strike] => fixed! [h3] questionable designs [/h3] - Bombs never replenished after you die, only when you clear the stage. => This limits your bomb usage to 9 times in the game, which is fair since bomb last for 10 seconds doing ridiculous damage and are able to skip 2 phases of bosses, but bombs shouldn't do that. Bombs should be used for certain evasion + doing some mid~high damage for at least a phase. - The most easiest available difficulty (Normal) is objectively as hard as other game's Hard difficulty Might change the review later on if things settle down, but currently, no.