TL:DR: The game isn't particularly fun, and it lacks essential content making it feel unfinished
I’ll break down this review into sections:
[b]Gameplay[/b]: For starters, the biggest thing that kills this game is it has [i]no single player whatsoever[/i]. The first time I fired it up, I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out why it wouldn’t start with just one player, then I realized that I had to add a second player to play it at all. Additionally, the multiplayer is local only, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but without a single player mode to play, it means the only time I can play this game is under the weirdly specific circumstance that I have people over locally to play with. However, beyond that, once the gameplay itself isn’t that fun either, mostly because the ships are so incredibly small that aiming at them with a joystick is a very precise ordeal, and anyone who has ever used a joystick must recognize that precision isn’t their strong suit. Shooting really only works up close and personal, and that is difficult since navigation is also a challenging ordeal in this game. Most of the time when I did play it people didn’t die to others, but rather died due to trying to move around and crashing into stuff, which isn’t a terrible thing, but if you are trying to create an interesting multiplayer experience, don’t make it so difficult to get to the part where you are interacting with other players. It eventually got to the point where the optimal strategy was to do minimal movements exclusively when a bullet was headed in your general direction, and to essentially play the whole game as a long-ranged sniper, which as I mentioned already with the whole aiming thing, isn’t really a fun way to play.
Now, in order to avoid being exclusively critical, here’s what I’ll say to the dev with regards to suggestions on how to improve the gameplay: Firstly, add some sort of singleplayer, even if it’s not the main focus, the lack of anything to do on my own makes this a game that can only be played with friends, which is not ideal. Additionally, upscale the graphics a bit. This will serve two purposes: 1. It will make aiming a bit easier by giving players a bigger target to hit, and 2. It will force the levels to be shrunken, which will in turn cause the players to be closer together from the outset, which will mitigate the aforementioned navigation issues (don’t overdo it though, that would cause rounds to end in seconds. It will require some testing and balancing, as all things do)
[b]Graphics[/b]: This game clearly is going for a retro/Atari styled look, but honestly, I don’t feel like the graphics were stylized enough. For the record, the menus are great and look as I would expect them to, however the ships, obstacles, and bullets all feel out of place relative to the initially simplistic graphical style. They don’t feel like one cohesive environment, but rather they just look like they were tacked on to a background, and it creates a bit of a visually jarring appearance.
If I might make some suggestions here, it’s to simplify the graphics even more, and work on lighting on the sprites. The sprites are very bright, but we’re in the middle of the black void that is space, so I would expect some shadows or something. The other suggestion is to simplify the graphics a bit more. The background/menus clearly indicates a more Atari-esc vibe for the graphics, but the other elements don’t reflect the excellent aesthetic you set up in the menus. Think simpler, and with more limited colors.
[b]Sound[/b]: Honestly, the sound is pretty great. I have no real complaints. The background music conveys the space theme pretty well, the bullets have that arcade-y zap that I would come to expect, and the movement from the engines is fine. The music isn’t amazingly memorable or anything like how FTL is, but it gets the job done, and that’s all I would expect here.
In conclusion, this game feels like it’s unfinished. If the dev feels that they have completed work on it, I would tell them that this isn’t something I would expect to pay money for. In it’s current state, this is the level of quality I would have expected to find on Newgrounds or Kongregate, rather than on Steam. I understand that this is the dev’s first published game, but to me all that says is that this should have been a learning experience, not a game from which money is expected. For the exact same amount of money, I could go buy “One Finger Death Punch”, or “Terraria” if I waited for a sale. For the record, I recognize this problem isn’t exclusive to this game, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed lately, that lots of people build their first (or near their first) game, and then expect it to be worth selling, when really for a game to be worth my time and money, it requires a level of work and polish that is substantially greater than what they have at the time.
As a note to the dev, who I’m sure will see this review at some point, I hope I haven’t killed/lessened your interest in game development, as that is not my intention, but rather I hope you will see and understand where I’m coming from. I have amassed a huge library of games on steam, and I’ve sorted over half of them into a category I’ve marked “Shovelware” because they are games that simply weren’t good enough to be worth spending time on, not because they couldn’t have been, but because they simply weren’t ready yet. As a consumer, I have a limited amount of time to spend on games, so for me, any game that I find irksome in some design element (like being required to round up a group of friends to play) is just a bit of trouble that I simply don’t have time for, and I could instead use that limited amount of time on a game that has the content I’m looking for. I hope you will take the experience you got from this game, and put it towards the creation of a far better and more polished one that will be worth my putting a great deal of time into, but beyond that, I hope you will see that there is a line between games that are good, and games that are good enough to sell, and work to be on the other side of that line next time.
Regardless, thank you for the free copy of the game (although I doubt you’ll be giving me another in the future, heh) I’ll be watching your future work in hopes of improvement.
