Weather Dominance

Neat game with a cute visual style, pretty fun and unique to play, the game is a fun challenge although the weapon wheel is a little awkward to control. I think this is a game you should check out

I bought this game after meeting the developer over Discord, and decided to leave a review with some feedback. Overall, this is a pretty good attempt for a first project and I think there's an interesting gameplay concept here. But I think the execution could have been better. 1.) The Weapon Wheel - This is probably the game's biggest issue. You have a wide variety of abilities to choose from, but it's cumbersome to switch between them. Using the TAB key instead of the mouse wheel is a bizarre choice to me, as many modern PC games have shown the benefits of using the mouse wheel for the weapon/inventory wheel. Being able to use the middle mouse button to bring up the ability wheel and scroll to switch between abilities would make the gameplay a lot more fast and seamless. Not that this game is fast paced by any means, but it would've made the game feel less slow. This mechanic is even worse on controller as you have to select an ability with the D-pad before using it. You also have to hit the "confirm" button to equip an ability instead of simply highlighting it, which adds to the cumbersome feeling of the wheel. Switching abilities is a core mechanic in this game, and it should be treated as such. 2.) Design Oversights - This game is impressive for the amount of things you can do. However it doesn't seem to properly utilize half of your abilities. I never saw a reason to use the dashing or snow abilities. Especially since I'm not even sure what the snow ability is used for. No enemies required snow to defeat them, and there was never a reason to freeze anything. Storm is also pretty under utilized because it takes half of your O2, and there's no consistent way to replenish it. And if you run out of O2, you die. So this makes the risk-reward of using Storm not very worth while. Picking up NPCs actively breaks some quests, as you can just move to the other side of the screen and teleport to the other side where the house/cave is. This completely negates any challenge this level might've had. This should be fixed in a future update. Occasionally you'll enter areas that are already "cleared," and most of them serve no purpose other than to let you skip to the next area. These areas should've been used as a way to regain some O2, as there's no other way to consistently collect it. The tutorial is also pretty basic and doesn't explain some of the games mechanics. Like I didn't even know I could use the number keys to select specific abilities! Opening chests also isn't explained in the tutorial, but there is an entry in Tips and Tricks that does. Maybe this was an attempt to add some "secret mechanics" to the game for the player to go "ah-ha!" when they figure it out. But it should've just been explained in the tutorial. 3.) Roguelike? - This might be more of a personal preference, but I don't think this concept works well as a roguelike. I think this game would be better with a more level-to-level structure with some sort of story. Maybe make it a puzzle game too? Something that better takes advantage of the game's various mechanics and better utilizes its abilities. I'm not 100% sure on how you would design a game like this, but I don't think roguelike is it. Or, at the very least, the game really needs to be improved or expanded upon in order for it to "gel" with me as a roguelike. 4.) Various Feedback - I didn't want to retread too much of what has been mentioned in other reviews, but I do agree that this game needs music, a better state machine when swapping between control and keyboard/mouse, and better detection on what input is currently in use. While I don't think the visuals are bad, they are a bit generic. I think recruiting an artist to give this game a more unique or visually interesting artstyle would really benefit this game's appeal. In conclusion, I do not think this game is worth $10. At most, you might get 40 minutes of gameplay before the gameplay loop looses steam. Pick it up and try it when it's on sale for $5 or less. If I could give this game a more neutral rating, I would. As I don't hate the game, but it's not as fun as I would've hoped. But I do see potential in it, if the developer continues to improve upon it.

Fun side scrolling roguelite with a variety of enemies, each with their own weaknesses. Diverse levels and lots of build mechanics ensure no run is exactly the same. Its a cheap fun game that you can relax and play, sort of like FTL in terms of roguelite elements. Combat is surprisingly intense at points. Might require some balancing as I felt very OP towards the end :P Also almost got stuck from a collision glitch but the devs have already noted it. Thanks for the free key, I really enjoyed the game :)

I received this product as a review copy from the team involved in the play testing and development of the project. They informed me it was fun, had charm, and was a family friendly game. I can attest that from my about 30 minutes of active game play, it has two out of three. The Good: You're a cute storm cloud that is trying to eliminate anything that tries to destroy the environment. Maybe? It's hard to tell, as the tutorial, adventure mode, and puzzle mode were very stingy with the clues. But the cloud is cute. The graphics are cute, and the whole thing is, well, cute. The Mediocre: A lot. Like, a lot a lot. The tutorial doesn't seem finished for a v1 game, the controls are inconsistent between levels and stages, and the objectives and game mechanics aren't spelled out in the tutorial. All of this could be forgive able, except, then we get to the bad. The Bad: The controls are WASD E/F, [TAB], Shift, RMB, and LMB. You can remap a few of those keys, but not all. The game has 6 or 8 abilities, depending on how you qualify the term, and there's a weapon wheel to select them. Oh, except the scroll wheel doesn't hot swap. The numeric buttons 1-6 do swap. But that's not labelled anywhere. Oh, and when you do press tab to bring up your weapon wheel, all of your other controls are still unlocked. Hopefully you're not on lightning and misclick on the wheel to toggle to another weapon and wind up bolting your objective causing a game over screen. There was a demo, but then the demo was pulled after the game went live, so if you want to try this game, it's going to cost you $9.99. Except it's horribly optimized. Badly. So if you do buy this game for $10, and want to give it a fair shake, you're going to not really have a LOT of time. I spent about 10-15 minutes trying to just get to a point where the game was ready to play. Like full screen mode on an i5 with 16gb of ram, a 1060GT with 6GB of RAM had frame stuttering, slowdown, and noticeable choking while going through the settings screens. Not that there was much there to setup. This game is VERY tiny. It's super undemanding, and it was like I was trying to boot up ARK. The REALLY bad: The developers socials are... well the Discord is... well it's empty. Except for a small argument between someone who made audio assets for the game and a dev. And a LOT of random screen shots of the game. And oh, most of the things I've listed in this review, being pointed out, almost a year ago. And that's not counting the X/Twitter for the developer. Every 4th or 5th Twitter post is a religious quote. There's a place for religion, politics, and the other third rails in the world. That place is not the Twitter account of an indie developer who pulls their game demo on a half complete game and appears to be trying to run off with $9.99 from Steam patrons one lost hour of life at a time.

Okay, I met the developer over discord and I am a developer myself. With that out there, I am not extremely familiar with this project, I did get a chance to play the demo and later purchased this to see what was up. It is my understanding that this is the developers first complete project and that this was created using Game Maker. My experience is in Unity and GODOT so in this critique I cannot speak to GameMaker but I will speak on fundamental design. 1. State Machine in specific a Finite one would have made much of the controls better, controls are the first impression and it was a bad one, you had various controls that are active at the same time. Generally I make a habit of locking controls within a FSM to ensure I keep the growing number of them under well... control no pun intended. 1a. Forced options, when the game starts it detects my controller, this would be fine if it could detect which input I was actually using later or if it didn't actively use the controller and gave me the option to upon detection. 2. Music, a completed project in my humble opinion needs to have a ST or OST you really shouldn't have pushed this out without one. I fiddled with settings a bit and found sound by default is off but that's just the SFX not any music. Without that you've given yourself a higher hurdle in pulling your player into the mood you are setting. 3. A game like this is impressive to me, in that you attempted to give everything functionality and to the point where you have evolving logic from sequences of interactions. That tells me there was a strong vision for the game before design which is great. 4. UI is very smooth, while the visuals are very likely engine default that's just a rub, you can easily replace those place holders, however it probably should have been done in Early Access not on full release. Conclusion. Okay this game has some very Nintendo-isc vibes but in what it is going for. It however can't get out of its own way in getting there. This could be largely fixed with the implementation of a proper state-machine and some music. You've got the idea though with your tutorial, and to be honest tutorials are by far the most difficult thing to design, you go too far people hate it you go too light people hate it but what exactly is too far or too light? The reality is there isn't one, you just need to make the first thing you teach be the skip button.