Gorgeous pixel art and good music! Some of the mechanics are a bit wonky, for example I did not see the purpose of the dash since it did not seem to have any invincibility frames. Also it took me a while to realize I had combo strings because the window for continuing the combo seems very restrictive. The hitstop upon striking an enemy was a little too excessive as well and may have contributed to the trouble with comboing. With these difficulties, it feels impossible to dodge enemy attacks and thus to get very far in the game. That said, it's a very good looking core! I hope you continue with this.

I took the time to try both versions, the jam submission version (v1.01) and the current version (v2.01). For rating purposes I will comment on the jam submission one first, then I will give feedback on the latest version.

The graphics and animations are very impressive. It’s a pretty fun beat’em up, but really not much of a shoot’em up at all. The hits feel great and I like that there is a follow up punch animation when the enemy is near. The explosions of the enemies when they die feel very satisfying. Gameplay is minimal and the magical girl concepts can be fleshed out more, but understandable since it was made in a couple of days. There is one big problem with the fighting - the punches are static and cannot target enemies who are of a different elevation from you. Worse, you can’t get to the same elevation if there are obstacles/walls, so in some situations it can be difficult to even get into a fight. Nevertheless, I had a decent amount of fun beating my way through to the fire-breathing boss. Well done!

Now this is completely separate from the jam rating, just some feedback for v2.01.

The things addressed right in the current version:

• Movement speed is good now.

The things worsened in the current version:

• Enemy/level design, too many of them and they are quite “bullet-spongy.” For beat-em-ups, they can usually remain spongy (and maybe even preferably so) if the player has more tools at their disposal, which I don’t feel that I do, so it feels a little tedious.
• As XCVG mentioned, the stagger during hits is poorly done. It slows the game down too much. v1.01 is better in this regard, and is already quite good at showing the impact of the player’s hits.
• Fight elevation issue still exists, and worsened now that there are small little bees.
• Since this is a single-player game, or even if it was a multiplayer game but at least in single-player mode, perhaps the player need not select a control scheme? They are all mutually exclusive, so why not allow all control schemes to be active at once, or is that a limitation of the Construct game engine?

If I was rating v2.01, although all the added graphical assets and animations are awesome, I would probably give it a lower score than v1.01. Fists of Magic has great potential, and I can see it being really fun with more refinements to come. I look forward to seeing more of it. Keep up the good work!

For a quick weekend project, this is pretty good.

I played the web version, I'm not sure what version this corresponds to.

The art is definitely what stands out here. It's very nice retro pixel art that I could see coming from a SNES or Genesis game. The title card/key art is a different style, and it too is very nice. There's a surprising quantity of it, with detailed backgrounds and a decent variety of enemies, too.

The audio is whatever, but you've got to limit scope somewhere.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is really rough. It feels... stuttery, I think is the best way of describing it. I don't think this is a performance issue but just how the game is designed. I think this is because your attack leaves you locked in place for what feels like an eternity, and some attacks can stunlock you, too. Meanwhile, the enemies can pound on you. It doesn't feel fluid and it doesn't feel fun.

I didn't find the dash all that useful, but it is something I'd expect to be pretty situational.

I think one thing that's missing is an incentive to actually stand and fight versus just rushing past enemies as much as possible. A lot of beat 'em ups forced you to clear a section before moving on, if I recall, and something like that might work here.

I'm a sucker for narrative, and this game doesn't scratch that itch, but I don't think it was supposed to, so I won't hold that against it.

Really nice game! Doubly impressive that it was all make in a weekend!

The graphics looked really nice, along with fitting SFX and music that gave it a great classic SNES/Sega Genesis era feel.

The gameplay was pretty good, though it would be nice to have a little more attack variety to spice up the beat-em-up feel. Also, and maybe this is personal preference, but I would have liked to still be able to move while punching. The boss was pretty simple mechanics-wise, but it worked well enough.

Having a story, or a little bit of background scenario or lore would also help pull me in too.

I think most of my critiques are things you might have addressed if you had started earlier in the jam, so this is still an impressive game! Really great work.

Also, a fellow Construct user! High-five!

This is a cute (and short) shoot 'em up/beat 'em up mashup. It's not without its flaws, but there's plenty to like too.

Things I liked:

• Rockin' song
• Excellent art for the characters and environment
• Simple controls

Things I didn't like:

• Character feels too slow. I don't think it's possible to dodge the ring of fire the boss spews due to this. The dash meter adds to this by preventing me from spamming the dash.
• It's not clear if the spiky vertically-moving enemies can be killed or not. They react like the other enemies with flashing and hit sound, but they don't die even after several hits.
• Keyboard controls felt a little awkward. I would have liked a keyboard config option.

Presentation-wise, this game is pretty massive with how animated and colorful everything is.

The idea of having a flying player in a platformer-like environment is interesting, however I felt the player was fairly slow to move around due to its low speed and having momentum (outside of the dash which needs to be recharged), and its main attack being fairly weak (the regular green enemies take a ton of punishment, eventually started running past them instead of trying to kill everything).

Pretty solid game throughout. The graphics are incredible—I could tell from the moment the title page appeared. Responsive controls, fluid animations, great enemies. I can't believe you did this in a week! 

reading the other comments, there is not much to add,

Overall: solid game play, but short and not challenging, pretty good for 3 days, specially considering you made all the art.

Keep it up, add a bit of story, its looking good.

The player controls great and the mechanics are mixed in really well. I think this would work well if it was expanded to include more levels and bosses. The boss was very easy to beat, so it felt kind of anticlimactic after the stage portion. It was still fun to play, and the pixel art is really well made! Good choice of music too.

Yo....This game was really good!!! It looked and felt great. I died once and then was able to beat the boss. I have a few issues

Using WASD was really tough when you needed to make quick decisions.
You need a pause button. 

Other than that, fantastic job!!! You've gotten the highest marks from me so far. 

This was a cool game that I was engaged with right away. It has a lot of potential but at the same time a lot that could be expanded upon/improved to really hit a high.

First the basics:

The controls were very weird to me, while they were basic enough to not be an issue arrow keys + z x c feel like a much more natural fit for the type of game this is. Of course any control scheme will have someone complaining until you make them fully customizable and this wasn't a huge deal.

The art was great, it pops out and is easy to understand but still exciting in a lot of ways. 

The one oddity was the boss, who looked like they were from a different game due to not having a dark outline, using dithering for shading, and using a generally less saturated palette than the other characters.

For the player feel: overall good, albeit slow. The dashing was very satisfying although it didn't really seem useful in the level outside of getting a head start against the boss to fit in more punches before needing to move again.

The enemies were cool but didn't feel threatening given as long as you were punching you were basically untouchable since there range was shorter than yours and punches stunned them.

If the player had faster movement leaning in on enemies that shoot at you while you generally need to get in close to punch could be a really cool dynamic.

Speaking of faster movement I feel like the entire game could be speed up 1.5x and feel a lot smoother.

Being said the core mechanics felt good, and it felt good having this character beating up bugs, with the character design being a big plus in it being engaging.

Cute game. MC a bit slow. Sometimes enemy will "stop" by the wall. Maybe intentional?

Visually a great game, working controller support is a big plus. The player character feels underpowered; her movement speed is slow, killing enemies takes too many hits, the dash takes a long time to recharge and is slightly too short. The grasshopper enemies have about as much range as you, and when you dodge past them, they turn around and hit you from behind. Not fair!

Overall it's fun for a prototype, although a pretty conventional way to genre-mash.

I think the mechanics were unfinished didn't really feel the shmup part, except the 1inch range, but okay fair enough it is still a range attack. But I thought there was gonna be more on the fist magic part to be honest. I can see it definitely being more fun when you have combos added, movement increased, fist attacks being bigger. Has potential.