I love BLAME!, and I love hot anime girls. So I immediately tried this game. The aesthetic, the visuals, the atmosphere, it all is amazing and I really like it. I would absolutely love to see this game succeed, and to purchase it one day. I saved notes as I played, and put together a bunch of detailed feedback. I'm super enamored with this game and will be following it's development.
Essential Game Changes:
• Key rebinding. For example, changing the inventory key to tab.
• Quick movement for inventory. Like shift clicking, or double clicking.
• Esc key needs to close the pause menu, rather than having to click continue.
• Logs need to disappear after use and go into journal.
• Nothing tells you that enemies can potentially have loot.
My opinions:
Combat and Enemies:
A collection of problems make enemies feel pretty bad. If they were all tweaked, I think combat would be much more impactful.
• Melee combat needs a lot of work. Enemies react to you way too fast, and attack almost instantly when you hit them into combat. (It's actually funny, the twitter preview video that I found this game with, actually shows this happening.) It’s very hard to parry with how fast it is.
• There’s also no visual indicator for the parry window, which makes the speed more frustrating. A color spark, screen glitch, or anything like that would make it feel better.
• Enemies attack way too fast back to back. The basic melee enemy will just smash your head in over and over, so it doesn’t feel like a fight. You have to run back and forth to avoid getting machine gun punched to death. Some enemies, like LODE_01_R, the spider bot on the "roof" area, actually melee so fast that they can stun lock and kill you without you being able to do anything.
• Melee enemies also don’t have enough health. A single parry is long enough to kill most of them, so the strategy becomes to hit them once, walk backwards (because they’re going to instantly attack), then safely approach, parry once, and spam hits until they die. It doesn’t really feel like a fight to me. This works even with the first weapon, so there isn’t much real reason to pick a weapon for different aspects, like less speed for more damage, or vice versa.
• Enemies should not respawn. You already have an enemy type that repairs and respawns enemies, the repair bot. Are they inspired by the builders in BLAME!? I think that’s very cool. But enemy respawning causes a few problems.
• Firstly, there’s no point to fight at all. Especially when enemies are passive until provoked. If an enemy is going to respawn on death or reload, why would I bother killing it and taking damage?
• Second, it makes the repair bot feel pointless. Why do I care about a repair bot if everything respawns anyway? You could remove regular respawning, make repair bots more useful and harder to catch, maybe even incorporate parkour into chasing one, and I think that would feel better.
• Third, you can get into a common scenario where you fight an enemy, take damage, reach a save spot, save, and then the enemy respawns anyway. Now you’re on less health for no real reason.
If melee enemies were bulked up, given more health and more attacks, and repair bots were made more prevalent and important, you could remove respawning and it would feel much better, in my opinion.
Miscellaneous:
• Saving is a minor problem, especially at the start. You have enemies that can kill you easily, jumps you can fall to your death from, but saving is a somewhat difficult process. I appreciate the aesthetic of the typing save station, but when I first started, I kept dying to the first enemy and having to run all the way down the steps and across the pipe bridge again. After doing that several times, it got kind of annoying.
A few deliberate autosave locations wouldn’t be bad. It would save run time, or stop you from having to redo so much exploration progress. Right now it’s a hard reload, so if you run across at the start, make some jumps, explore, collect the first weapon and some ammo, then die to the first enemy, you don’t keep those items. You have to re-explore and collect them again. I don’t exactly know the solution, and autosave points might ruin the aesthetic of the save station, but it’s just a thought of mine.
• An accessibility option to not have to manually type to open a door or save would be nice. However, I still appreciate the aesthetic of the typing, it's kind of a reach but if there was anyway to select a command (maybe manually clicking it on the interface), and see the series of commands still go across the screen, I bet it would feel nice. I think the typing is cool personally, but it does get old quick when you save multiple times and have to type the save command every single time. Maybe you can type it in once to preserve that mechanic, then after it can be done automatically for that specific save station? Or maybe even if you press arrow key up it cycles through history of commands. So if you are saving again you can just hit arrow key up rather than typing /datasave again and again.
• A problem regarding enemy difficulty is also tied to how hidden Shaft is. When I first started playing, I was fighting enemies, taking damage, and walking around on very low health because the heals you loot aren’t permanent. I was shocked by how punishing the lack of heals felt, to the point that I completely restarted because I was in such a health deficit.
Turns out, there is a machine that heals you to full, it’s just hidden. A little too hidden for the very start of a game. If you literally just moved Shaft to the left some, you would see her sitting up there as you approached the save station, which would lead you to explore up there, find her, and in turn find the room with your gun and healing station. If Shaft was clearer to find from the start, combat would not feel as punishing as it does. She should also at least give you a hint toward the door she tells you about, even something simple and vague like “keep climbing up” or something.
• Also, the light for the surveillance eye is not distinct enough. In the “roof” area, the light isn’t even visible at all. In the other area you can see it, but it still isn’t bright or distinct enough to understand that you should avoid it. You just sort of learn that after an encounter of two with the surveillance getting mad at you. I’m not sure what the solution is, but it is without a doubt hard to see.
This game is awesome. If you're reading this and you haven't read BLAME!, read it.