I've heard of this game thanks to BlackMageMavvy making tweets about the development. I'm glad I decided to take notice of it, it was a very pleasant time and quite polished.
What I find good:
- The graphics and effects, it was the best thing to note of IMO. It was very good animation quality and the pixel art was fantastic. Props to the little details too, like how chunks of the enemy fly when defeated.
- The music, though minimal (understandably so, it's a small project), was pretty nice and atmospheric for the game's areas. Again, a neat detail was the dynamic-ness of the music in places, like for bosses.
- The game-play is a very fun strategy game, and I like all of the units and their roles. None felt like they were the "definite best", they all had a good balance, which I appreciate as that's hard to do sometimes. As someone whose only strategy experience being Fire Emblem, this feels like a great foundation to build up.
- The game itself felt very polished in terms of build, I haven't run into many glitches/bugs, apart from one.
What I thought could be improved:
- Personally, I feel that the difficulty is kinda lopsided towards the beginning of the game. Ironically, I feel that when you get closer to the end, it's actually easier than when you start the game. Part of this may be because of...
- The lack of tutorial really hurts and is probably the biggest flaw to me. I eventually got used to and learned how to play the game, but only once I started to reach the end of the game. I feel that if the game had a proper tutorial of some kind to learn more about the units in the game, I would also be able to excuse the above-mentioned difficulty since I could still know how to play through the difficulty.
- There was one glitch/bug I ran into where the color of the range of a unit stayed black and wouldn't go back to normal until I ended the turn. Unfortunately, I don't exactly remembered how exactly I managed to get it to happen. I believe it had something to do with selecting one of the unit portraits while also choosing where to attack, but that's all I can recall.
Overall, I think that this could have a lot of potential as a game. As a small project, from a small team in a small time frame, this is very good. Difficulty aside, there's a lot of polish in this game. You all did very good!