Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Dismatch seems like a  rich premise,  combining the match 3 and roguelike genres; those kinds of hybrids are often very successful. However, in this case, I felt that the promise of the game was difficult to discern through its general slowness . In a  superficial way, the game just moves slow…the animations to slide tiles around, or to send energy or attacks from one character to another, all feel like they could be (at least) doubled in speed. In a more substantial way, the battles in Dismatch, even with very early enemies like snakes and rats, can take 5 minutes or more. Each attack that you perform has to be powered up, they all power up in parallel, once you do attack it’s random whether you attack a critical body part or a trivial one, and those attacks also might fail if you roll low or your opponent’s defense is buffed. Given that most of your attacks start out with no bonus, this can mean the majority of attacks you make against an early enemy do nothing…which isn’t the greatest feeling. I would be curious to see what this game played like if: a) your attacks fired off as soon as you filled their meters (rather than needing their own action), or b) your attacks didn’t have a “meter” at all, and simply activated when you matched their icons.

  My lowest rating for this was for aesthetics, which I feel requires slightly more explanation. I liked the art style of the game, in fact, and found the color-coded icons both charming and easy to read. Where I found the issue was with the overall placement of elements in the UI, their relative size, and the timing of their updating. When you make an attack, for instance, your eyes have to go from the tiles you just matched to the menu bar to check that the meter is full, then you’re likely looking back as your opponent makes their match, then you look back to activate your attack, which causes a beam to shoot from your menu and also a body part to darken on the other end of the screen (before the beam hits it), and to find out the effect of that you have to then look at the bottom of the screen, where not the most recent message tells you how the hit/miss was calculated. This might sound like a silly gripe, but as I was playing I consistently had the experience of not knowing where to look, or not knowing what had just happened.

  A few other stray observations. I think that there was no trigger to scramble the tiles if no match is present, which would be nice. I also think that resetting the board between enemies would be great. It could also be valuable to not include the icons (like the cog) that do not appear in either opponents’ action menus, thus cutting down on chaff and allowing for more, easier matches when the two characters have limited options. Also, I came across a few very fun features – I had a pair of boots for a time that allowed me to make seductive poses on a match 4. Those touches are very nice.

• I like the colorful ui and the controls were very straight forward.

  I would have liked to be able to click on a body part to get a description of the status like you can with the items.

  The gameplay was relaxing and fun.

  A common mechanic of matching games is that falling tiles can match with existing tiles for combos, but it seemed like (and I may be mistaken) sometimes the tiles coming from the top would already contain a row/column of 3.

  I could definitely see this being a really fun full game with some more balancing and the things you listed in the comments.

• Love the aesthetics, and Dismatch is pretty fun as is, although it's also far too slow to advance. I played for more than an hour and still wasn't half way to the end, but also hadn't been in serious danger the entire time. Shortening the game would go a long way towards improving the experience. Enemies take forever to kill, but even without changing the mechanics or content at all, simply having faster animations would make the experience a lot smoother. It would also be nice to have persistent stat info displayed in the interface, which would help answer questions as to how much (and how permanent) certain bonuses are, like the attack bonus from using some items.
  

  Overall this is a really good mix of the match-3 and roguelike genres.