Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A small roguelike taking inspiration from Superhot, though largely only in the sense that shots move when you do.  This concept has the potential to result in some interesting gameplay, however in this case the implementation is a bit too bare-bones for any interesting interaction to happen and the game is marred by bugs and control irritations.

  COMPLETENESS
  Has a high degree of visual polish, but the game itself is very buggy and froze up multiple times.

  AESTHETICS
  The tiles are nicely drawn, though seem to have nothing in particular to do with the theme of the game.  Controls are awkward and unintuitive, especially for such a simple game - it took me a while to work out that the game expects you to click the fire button and then click on one of the highlighted tiles around you to select a direction rather than one of the arrow buttons right next to it.  This results in a lot of irritating mouse movement and there appears to be no keyboard shortcut for this.  The facing direction of enemies is represented by a tiny red dot, which is OK when you get used to it but could have been made a lot clearer.

  FUN
  Gameplay is fairly tedious and largely consists of firing off a projectile along a row of tiles and then jiggling backwards and forwards somewhere safe while it bounces backwards and forwards and wears down the enemy's health.  Shoot another projectile to cancel out the existing one.  Rinse and repeat over and over again until the level is cleared.  The powerups which allow you to shoot through walls only make this even easier.  The only occasions where you are in any real danger is when the level generation has you trapped in a small corner of the screen with limited room to maneuver.  This demonstrates the potential for more tactical gameplay, but the game needs to have more going on (such as more mobile enemies or resource limitations) to really start to become interesting.

  INNOVATION
  The shots-only-move-when-you-do mechanic is atypical, though has been done before.  The directional enemies are fairly novel.

  SCOPE
  A very limited scope, with hardly any variety in gameplay.

  ROGUELIKE
  Qualifies as a roguelike in my view, albeit a fairly simple one more akin to Desktop Dungeons or similar.

• Defeat all enemies for 5 waves to win. I was unable to beat it.

  Completeness 2
  Enemies sometimes show up in between squares.
  In every game where I didn't lose I eventually ran into a situation where I inexplicably couldn't move and/or shoot.
  Sometimes maps which start you out forced to move onto an enemy are generated.

  Aesthetics 3
  Looks blurry.
  Controls are OK. Arrow keys to move, click to shoot.

  Fun 2
  I couldn't figure how enemies decided whether to move or not. There was nothing interesting in the parts of the game I could understand, just don't run into your own bullets.

  Innovation 3
  Ranged attack focus.
  Walls in between squares.

  Scope 2
  Several enemy sprites, a few minor shot effects.

  Roguelikeness 3
  Turn/grid based
  Random maps
  Permafailure
  No RPG stuff
  Not much tactics/strategy