Acquired taste

This is a review of the demo, please don't take this as a review of the full game

To start off I hope you read this review in full, as i have spent quite a bit of time on it and i think i can provide you with some good tips. I will also say i am rather biased on the matter of shooters since i make them myself and have a very high expectation from them. Especially if i decide i am going to buy it.

Therefore this will be quite harsh, but read through and you will see that overall i liked your game

I think the best way to review this is to go through how i felt from when i started to play it till when i finished (as best as i can remember).
When i first turned the game on it felt professional. The sound was nice, your logo was superb, i noticed very high resolution. My computer is kinda weak though, so the very high resolution didn't roll over too well and the menus came through rather slow. No big deal, i press the button to begin the battle.

I am provided with 6 or 7 pages of loads of information. I am instantly overwhelmed and assuming that the first page is the most important one, and i read through the plot you have provided, hoping the following pages will be lighter on text. I was right, they were lighter, but i have been provided with a large amount of information i do not know how to use as of yet. Inevitably i skip most of it, trying to find a page about the controls yet finding none.

At this point you need to understand that the player has absolutely NO idea what kind of a game this is yet. Actually I had guessed that it would be a side-scrolling shooter, since the screenshots you put up have little emphasis on the surrounding territory and have your character floating in air. So when i am thrust into the game i am mildly surprised but not flustered.

This is when i realize i have not been told what to do. You gave me 7 pages of information and i decided to read some of it and I don't even know how to move! I quickly realize the movement system and start shuffling around the screen, wondering what the sphere in the middle of the screen is.

Here i would like to mention how much you could have done with this sphere. As much as it is your base during the game and essentially your lifeline, it just sits there. Perhaps a door could open and you walk out of it, or if you die the sphere could glow red, its primary reason for being is in trouble! or perhaps it could simply hover and at least show me it has life, but instead it is just there, and i quickly overlook it.

Because i am on a laptop it is not so clear to me that i will be using the mouse this game, so when i jump down into the cavern expecting to be progressively enlightened how to use my character i am shocked to find an enemy waiting for me. ONLY NOW am i instructed how to defend myself and defeat enemies, and i try out what seems to be a super powerful ray gun. The explosions it generates are tremendous, and the shots my enemy fires are sooo puny, i feel i can easily take it out. So i stand there and shoot at it, and my health keeps falling, and when i am warned to return to the surface, i ignore it and decide to stick it out, seeing my enemy change color and anticipating its approaching death. But i die before it, and i am taken up to the surface and without ANY instructions it says "Retrieve the body", or something like this.

I try pressing random buttons, nothing happens, I have not acquired any reinforcements at this point (but i am not aware of the whole concept yet) and end up quitting and battling again. I skip through the tedious 7 page instructions again, stopping to read the part about enemy health a bit more carefully and play again. Here i begin to enjoy your game, but only here! I already have a bad taste in my mouth and now i am reluctant to commit towards killing enemies. I discover how shooting at them creates orbs at the top of the screen, and i stockpile a whole bunch before going to the surface, realizing too late that the instructions on how to use each orb disappear every time you collect a new one. So i just upgraded myself all this amount and i have no idea how to utilize it. WTF.

So in the end i die but for some reason i am still not too clear of i have reinforcments at the top of the screen to come down and pick me up. Now i would also like to point out how UNOBVIOUS you made it that the TINY LITTLE CRYSTALS are the primary target. I know you say "destroy the crystals" many times, but the enemies are SO large and the crystals are SO small that I kinda wish you just circled the damn thing in the beginning and said "hey, shoot this!" Only about now do i realize the importance of the crystals, and now that i have all this extra fire power with me i procede down farther and after some minutes (I am finally having a lot of fun now that i understand) I win!

I am quite addicted to your game at this point and feeling confident that I am awesome at it i decide to play again. I assume the demo is over since you have made very clear to me that the difficulty will NOT be adjusting to my level in the demo version. So i jump down the cavern in what would appear to be the same exact level format and BOOM there are 2 (i think you called them hives) ships sitting RIGHT THERE, i am totally shocked because i did not expect any sort of major level difference and retreat to the surface to recover health. I try experimenting with the round sphere in the middle of the screen, trying to buy some sort of early reinforcements, when i realize too late a ginormous amount of ships have followed me to the surface. Prior to this i had no knowledge that they could do this, so i begin trying to hide but inevitably i die.

Now i am tired of your demo, I have decided not to buy it, i turn it off.
An hour later I turn it on again.

I'm not sure if it's just that I'm that bad at the game, or if the difficulty level really DID jack up substantially higher, but whatever happened, suddenly it became much harder. I felt bewildered because you gave NO INDICATION that the difficulty level would be increasing. But i play through a few more times, and destroy a behemoth for the first time, and win again.

When i play again it seems the difficulty hasn't increased as drastically as the first time, with the exception of 2 behemoths spawning exactly on top of each other. It felt a bit amateurish that both would occupy the same space, as if a cheap attempt to ramp up the difficulty, but other than this the 2 behemoths didn't bother me as much as i thought they would.

I beat it again, have had my fill, and shut it off. Please don't get the wrong feeling that i am hating your game, i am only trying to help you understand!

Now for some thoughts:

In the game you advertise about randomly generated levels and campaign missions and the excitement of a full game. But you leave all of it to the imagination. Still now I cannot imagine what a campaign mission would be like, except with different level designs and objectives such as "kill all enemies" and "destroy all crystals" and "collect all __ lying around the screen". Because i cannot imagine a campaign, i am not inticed to buy.

I would like to say how impressed i was with the sprites. I really loved the way they looked, the way they glowed. It is my opinion that they would be much better if they didn't awkwardly wield guns dangling around them, aiming very slowly, shooting very inaccurately. I wish they breathed fire or something. Here is the main point: the way they LOOK is more threatening than the shots they fire. When they shoot at me I am initially less concerned about the gunfire as the fear that they will get too close and maul me x)

I like the sound. It was ok. It was very repetitive, and overall i wasn't really impressed...It did the job though, and didn't take away from the experience.

When I say the graphics are "rigidbody" in the cons section I mean that the sprites and characters, as much as they move and twist and turn, they really aren't ANIMATED. Except for the arms of the guy you control, he has no real traits you would associate with him being a human. He doesn't even walk. And the enemies you shoot at don't do so much movement either, but you are less concerned with their movement since you look more at yourself than at them.

Finally I would like to point out how weak the explosions look when you turn the effects off. My computer is weaker, so when i turned them off and noticed performance going up a lot, i was really disappointed that all the explosions i had grown to love were gone. I was hoping they would be reduced, that there would be a setting in between off and on. It feels like you must either have a good graphics card or be prepared to suffer with inferior graphics. Tough luck pal

But overall I enjoyed. Not enough to buy it, I guess. I gave it a 4/5 because I feels like you're almost there. If you will notice i have no real complaints about the gameplay itself, only how you introduced the elements of playing! I feel this could be an excellent game if you put just a little more work into it here and there, which will admittedly add up to quite a bit of time, and I think that many others will feel the difference as well.