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BananaMilkshakes rated Alien Blimp (Demo) Update 1!!!

A downloadable game for Windows.

Despite that I'm alright with games that are naturally hard, this game is ridiculously hard for the wrong reasons.

  1. The controls are horrible. WASD to move is alright (And Q to inflate), but Space to jump and K key to shoot? Why not make it J to Jump and K to Shoot? Otherwise, it just makes it more confusing and fighting against the controls than the game itself.
    1. You can't attack and immediately inflate/deflate the size, since the game will only do that if you're not in the shooting animation. For a fast-paced game, this is especially bad and creates input lag/delay, forcing the player to wait a little before changing size.
  2. The collisions are janky and often get you stuck. This is especially when changing size via inflation, and it's more apparent in the second map in a tight narrow area.
  3. The enemies are unfair. The turrets have a small hurtbox, coupled with the player bullet's small hitbox (And other factors, such as ridiculously high fall speed) makes it rather difficult to take the enemy down in 3 shots. You cannot aim your shots; you'll just have to either inflate to rise up or just wait until the turrets is within jumping distance.
    1. The grounded enemy, once it shoots, hardly has any delay in-between shots, making it much more difficult to take it down, even if it has 1 health.
  4. The level designs have bad telegraph, and it doesn't tell the player that you should use the inflate mechanic at certain areas.
    1. The first level is apparent, where you fell down into a pit of spikes not knowing that you'll have to inflate yourself at the right timing before hitting the spikes below (or just hug the walls to the right to avoid that).
    2. The second level is also apparent as well, as it doesn't show you the bed of spikes below until you fall down. Following that, but the enemies that waits for you to deflate back to normal makes it near impossible to just jump down and attack the enemy before it attacks you first.
    3. The boss level doesn't tell you to hit the 3 pillars to deactivate the boss, coupled with the small hurtbox mentioned from the turrets, making it difficult to hit it 5 times to deactivate, requiring the player to use the inflation system to reach there. I could've saved my lives and 30+ minutes of my time if I haven't realized that and not shooting the boss and expect it to change.

Side Note: When you actually get used to the mechanics and knowing the patterns of the stage, it does get easy. I manage to get a full 8500 score without taking a single damage/life.

Overall: While it is promising, it's filled with lack of telegraph from stage design, enemies being unfair, bugs that makes you stuck in walls, coupled with the janky control scheme (which may get used to), and the demo is very short with just 3 levels. Nonetheless, if the issues were fixed, I may rate it higher, but for now, I'll have to make my review fair and honest.