Before anyone freaks out: no I'M NOT A JUDGE, I just rate and give feedback to everyone's games.
My rating has the same weight as anyone else's!
alrighty
Itch marketing:
- Cover art is cool
- Gifs are cool, although the second and the third one feels too dark
- No background image on the page is a missed opportunity
- The table stuff looks interesting
- The icons are fancy so that's nice. Would like to see some "end game screenshots" somewhere to boost excitement
Welp time to play!
- yay fullscreen
OKAY SO THE MUSIC
- Main menu theme: sine waves absolutely suck if you only use them because they can feel VERY sharp on certain sound systems (like mine) and they are very prone to creating strong dissonances when you do chords/intervals. I would avoid sinewaves for everything but sub bass, or a high pitched melody (and even then, you need to EQ out the high end to make it NOT annoying and ear piercing)
- The "hits" are cool I guess, you could experiment with adding hi-hats to add more rythm and high end to make it feel more complete.
- The melodic ideas are interesting but definitely switch instruments or synths or anything BUT SINE WAVES PLEASE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (you might want to look into sound fonts, or free VST plugins like Vital and Spitfire LABS)
OKAY LET'S ACTUALLY PLAY THE game
- the UI is nice and cool good job, although the PAUSED text is slightly blurry
- okay I'm muting the music, I really though there was going to be something else for ingame.
even more sound design tech then,....,./;,.';,.'/
- Add reverb in the engine. You are in a literal cave, why am I hearing fully "dry" sounds?
- Panning on the footsteps don't make sense at all. The sounds shouldn't be so w i d e.
Okay actual gameplay now
- I basically missed the tutorial on my first run and died lmao
- the turrets UI should gray out turrets that I can't buy. Why can I even try to place them down without the resources necessary?
- The "horde incoming" text is behind the turrets :wah:
so I played it for a bit, reaching like difficulty 7 and it's okay I guess, so here's my final notes
- The resources are mega inbalanced. You need to use a lot more of one type than the other, and that doesn't feel great later in the game when you can't spend like 300 of the purple rocks
- Give me a way to attack pls. I want to hit enemy. It's good risk and reward trust me
- For the majority of my playtime I had no idea where the action was happening. I just kept hearing action, but had no clue where it was. Probably should add some enemy arrows, or a minimap, or the ability to zoom out to fix that.
- The "objectives" felt way too random, I had no idea where any of them were (again could be fixed with an arrow/minimap) and that just made me ignore it immediately. There isn't a progress bar or anything visual to show my "run progress" that would motivate me further, so the game essentially remained goalless for me which is why I stopped playing.
All in all, it's not that awful of a game that you make it out to be. It definitely has places for improvement, but at least I'm not complaining about the juice/UI (mostly) like with your previous games, so that's an improvement I suppose.