I like it! Fun, fast paced and challenging!
Things I particularly enjoyed:
- The fast pace and freedom of movement (being able to shoot through the ground to escape the rockets was a great touch! I enjoyed moving around in the free space, then also enjoyed enclosing myself in a walled area and shooting at incoming enemies before burrowing away!)
- The procedural level generation; being able to go as far as I wanted was nice I think. I think if it was a smaller space I would have felt less freedom with tactics (and the ground would eventually run out haha), so this combined with the destructible environment was very cool.
- Once leveled up I felt more like a badass (admittedly I only have gotten to level 5 thus far; but its been fun trying different tactics); was much harder on level 1 trying to aim the single shot though haha. Once I was able to spray my projectiles it was a cool feeling moving around at speed blasting away everything in my path and chewing through the ground with ease to escape rockets.
Things to improve:
- Audio: From what I could tell there was no sound at all? Even if you can't hear sound in space I think pew-pew sound effects for firing, explosions for killing the bases, a crunchy sound as you break through ground and action-themed background music (heavy war drums, wailing guitar, or perhaps electronic high BPM) would have amped this game up to 11 :)
- Rewinding mechanic was underutilised: It felt like it was added on as an afterthought rather than basing the game around it/a core feature of the game (which it probs should be for a Rewind themed game). I was very disapointed when I found out my health didn't revert back to pre-hit at very least when I rewound, that would have made it a useful gameplay mechanic at least (e.g. risking warping back into rocket-traffic to get health back) and after that I didn't really use it ever again cause it often confused me more than helped me. I'm not sure what you developed the game in, but if it was Unity check out Chronos from the asset store; I think you could do some cool stuff with it in this game (e.g. rewinding only the player to regain health; firing a bomb/wide-beam which tags rockets and rewinds them to clear a path; having a special rare bomb which pauses/rewinds all rockets for a few seconds to give you a breather when overwhelmed etc.)
- Controls: I'm split on this; on the one hand I felt it was maybe part of the charm of the game to struggle with the controls a bit (a bit like a successor to Asteroids); on the other hand, players always feel better when they feel they are in control of their character. It's just a bit hard to aim precisely and it does get confusing whether to push left or right (which sounds like i'm dumb, but in the heat of the moment when you're upside down going in a particular direction it can be hard to figure out in a split second). Perhaps having mouse for aiming and a button for thruster would have been easier. Controller support would have been great too (being able to just point the analog stick in the direction you wanted to go/aim and then having right trigger for thruster would have made control 10x easier). If you use Unity check out the new input system, it lets you map functions to keyboard and controller quite easily.
Overall: Really nice fun game which perhaps underutilised the theme a bit and would be enhanced greatly by audio.
Hope you found this feedback helpful. Well done!