Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
Unfortunately, my experience with this game wasn't all that fun. I found aiming to be challenging due to the angle the game is on and the method for slinging candies to, if I'm being honest, frustrating. If a mine was by the candy I was trying to sling, the game would regularly grab the mine instead of the candy even if the candy seemed to be closer. I also wasn't a fan of how you had to walk towards enemies to sling candies at them as, if the enemy was too close, this could easily result in the player getting hurt. Which happened to me. A lot. I also didn't really understand the reason for the things I was doing. Why am I cooking food for the children? So they grow up and be productive members of this society? Okay, so what do the various buildings I'm constructing offer? Do they do anything to help further whatever my mission is? Do they provide me with bonuses? I ask because if they do provide me with bonuses, then there's reason to do certain things at certain times. Otherwise, I'm better off just doing them in the order the campaign wants me to and thus having any "choice" in it makes no sense.
Now before I get deep into the gameplay loop, there are two smaller things I want to cover. First, there is an obvious peaking issue in the sound effect when candies spawn. Even if you turn down the sound effects, the distortion behind it can be heard. The original file is just way too loud. Second, if there's going to be a thing in the mines or any area where there's a collectable reward upon clearing a floor, the player should not be allowed to leave before clearing it. Otherwise, you'll have players who get upset if, on the first time they're doing it, they so happen to not understand what's going on and accidentally proceed to the next area without getting their reward.
Okay, now for the gameplay loop. So I'll admit upfront that I've never been a fan of aim mechanics that require the player to put themselves closer to what they're targeting in order to aim. By this, I'm not talking about if you just have to get closer to make your aiming more accurate. I'm referring to where you stand in a spot, you do what you need to do to start your attack, then you need to move towards the enemy to finalize the shot process. This sort of system often results in players getting hit because an enemy is too close and they can't do what they need to do to aim the shot right. This is made even worse by the set up where you need to be further away from the candy you're slinging to get it greater velocity, meaning you can't just do short shots as you're likely to not even get the shot past you fast enough to hit a close enemy. I found myself spending way more time just running around, waiting and waiting for the right moment to be able to shoot.
Then there's how enemies just spawn anywhere on the map. Just in my last attempt, I nearly got hit three times because an enemy spawned almost directly on top of me. Given the aiming mechanics, this is even worse as you could grab and begin aiming a candy for a different enemy when suddenly, there's an enemy in your face. Now you have to abandon your shot and run. Of course, there's an easy way to fix this without changing it: where the enemy will spawn is telegraphed early. So let's say an enemy spawns. About half way through the timer before the next spawn, a pillar appears on the field in a spot. That spot is where the next enemy will spawn. Now if a player sees a pillar spawn near them, they know to abandon the area and move away.
Lastly there's the boss. I'll be honest, this boss infuriated me because it seemed to be random when it would start and stop attacking. So many times I would expect it to stop attacking because it seemed to fulfill a quota I had previously observed... only for it to change its mind and leap at me as I was trying to set up an attack. After thining about it, I eventually realized that it likely is just random (otherwise, there's no explanation for why it fired the cone of rocks over 10 times in a row while the fight was very early). Thus my only recourse came to be that I'd just run around until I knew it had actively stopped and hope I was near a candy to fling at it; otherwise, I was going to end up still running until the conditions came into play.