Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Sewer Shootout is a pretty standard "find the thing" type roguelike quest, themed on having, well, a shootout in a sewer with some cartoony sewer people and gangsters in a bid to recover your lost cell phone. (At least, cartoony is the vibe I get.) It's a pretty traditional roguelike that has a major mechanic that lends it innovation but also contributes to some balance issues: Weapons break. But it's not clear when or why they break, so it feels like a punishment that you haven't earned. The game, in the sense of the equipment you're left with, feels like a bit of a "slot machine", mainly because of the aforementioned mechanic. Some levels also seem harder than others for where they're at in the progression. However, it's easy enough overall that this probably won't matter to players more skilled than I. Scope is on-point for a week's work and the aesthetics are alright. The letters were a little wobbly for my taste but controls were good and well-communicated, mostly. There's a tactical trick or two that make it go way smoother, as well, but I'll not talk about those for fear of spoiling the experience, if this sounds like your kind of thing. Overall a short and sweet, but far from perfect, game. Pretty good for a "first ever Rogue-like" as the readme describes it.
• Nice, well-rounded game. I liked the small number of elements. The resource management with knives and guns was fun and pretty forgiving. Some of the enemies felt the same, but overall had good variance. The number of options for the player is pretty limited, basically point and shoot. And I think some extra polish would've been nice, like some indication of knife and gun durability. And perhaps auto equipping the same item if it breaks. Nice job!
• Completeness: Feature-complete. Found one major bug where if you failed to pick up an item from a stack of items, it deletes the item you failed to pick up, which wasn't great. The balance felt really bad; weapons break almost immediately, and your health regenerates, so the consistent strategy is to get into a corridor, wait for enemies to exhaust their ammo, beat them to death, and then heal. I suspect that was not intended. Aesthetics: Mostly functional but I died multiple times to not being able to read my HP total, given the dark-blue-on-black nature of the UI. Fun: Due to the aforementioned weapon degredation, it quickly became repetitive, since I expected a boss and saved my good guns for it. Innovation: It was competently executed but featured no novel mechanics or interesting swerves. Scope: Pretty decent. Traditional Roguelikeness: Definitely a trad-roguelike.