Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I'm immediately struck with strong Binding of Isaac vibes from this, could just be the tileset. The game has a good graphical style, although the player character doesn't really fit in with the rest. Play is intuitive and smooth, controls well. Unfortunately, there's little to do with that smoothness: gameplay consists of walking into featureless rooms and beating identical enemies, then a boss that's a slightly upgraded version of the last one. It was also painfully slow at the beginning, something that got better with the upgrades - these could have been lootable items to increase interaction, maybe choices as well? All in all a good showing for a 7DRL, but didn't really catch my interest.
• Really like the choice of character sprite definitely make me feel like I'm throwing fireballs the lighting effect was a nice touch on those. This one is kind of right up my alley enter the gungeon is one of my most played rogue-likes and I'm always excited to see more bullet hell esque games. There's just not a lot to do in this one levels 1-3 are really slow 6 shots to kill a enemy and they're all weak to circle strafing. Then you get the triple shot and the game really picks up but doesn't scale bosses health so by the time you get the 5 way spread on level 6 your not even seeing boss attack patterns anymore. I cant lie though I really enjoy walking into rooms and just filling them with fireballs. But that's also the most unfortunate design decision I would've like to have those upgrades in the map somehow as there currently no incentive to go to any other rooms once you find the boss. The game feels very samey and not very rogue-like-y in this state the maps are randomized but the range for that is so low since the enemies seem to fixed on some rotation the runs play out the same each time. I like ti beat all the games I play for this but I'm not sure if that's possible with this one. My longed run was 20+ maps in and the game just closed, no crash report or anything it just exited along with the console. Had that happens 3 or 4 times with no clear cause as to why. Just thought it would bring that to your attention although I'm sure that's not really helpful information for bug-fixing. All in all the movement and shooting feels good and the aesthetics are nice it just needs a hook.
• An Isaac-style twin-stick roguelite where you move to a room, get locked in it until you kill everything that moves, and move to the next one until you kill the boss and get to the next level. This being a 7DRL, the amount of content is obviously limited: there's exactly one hostile elemental type per floor, and though your character looks vaguely electrical, their only ability is to toss fire darts, while the only form of character advancement is adding on two more bolts per shot for every three floors cleared. And while pixel art is surprisingly good, the complete lack of any sound produces a very uncanny effect: to a lesser extent, same goes for the combination of well-animated elementals and completely static torches on the walls. Ultimately, the elementals may look differently, but they are all ranged attackers that fire progressively larger bursts of projectiles directly at your location, so the combat comes down to entering the room, getting all elementals in the centre, and circle-strafing until they are all gone. The bosses actually require less movement than the basic rooms: they cycle through three projectile atterns that all look nice, but aren't particularly difficult to dodge. In fact, the difficulty of any given encounter ultimately determined by room size more than anything else, as it is completely independent of the number of enemies. Thus, you can enter a large room and not get attacked until its lone elemental moves into view from the edge offscreen, or you can walk into a small room and be practically surrounded by 6-7 elementals and proceed to take a lot of damage. The only way to heal is by moving on to the next floor: thus, you should try to just locate the boss room ASAP and not bother with anything else on the floor once you destroyed the boss. Lastly, the game is endless right now: it'll eventually start cycling through the elemental themes you already cleared before. In all, Elementalist is still a promising seed of a game. With its commercial-grade art and basic mechanics already nailed down, I could see it turning into a something like a better version of the old Binding of Isaac competitor, A Wizard's Lizard - perhaps it could even make the lack of metaprogression into a selling point. It just needs a proper ending(s) and character development pathways, as well as more variety in enemy types, boss patterns, room layouts and the other things which determine the longevity of a roguelite.