I’ve encountered a lot of problems with the game. I’ll point out the bad experiences first before I get to the positives. I’m playing the Windows build and there is a bug where if you press Esc and open the menu during battle, after closing it, the WASD keys still affect the UI controls and would change the music volume, and it even kicked me to the main menu. In the tutorial, I appreciated the ability to replay the dialogue because I missed the first sentence (since the dialogue auto-proceeds) but when I tried to replay the dialogue, then press Go!, the dialogue sounds still play in the background. It seems like the UI was simply hidden, not disabled/destroyed which causes many problems, I was afraid to touch any of the UI from thereon. I feel that the character’s hitbox is too large in comparison to the screen/movement space and in some situations, it felt like I had to eat the damage or draw for Teleport, which takes away a bit of the joy of out-maneuvering the attacks. The character sprite can be as it is, but I feel that the hitbox needs to be smaller. The enemy HP is either too high, or the player’s attacks of a measly 1 damage is too low, it felt quite bullet spongy. I’d imagine being able to fire all my 10 lasers would be enough (and that is already on the high side because I have to draw for it) not 20. And I need 4 focus just to turn my damage into 2 plus I have to draw for it? That’s artificial difficulty and I didn’t feel good winning. Most of the abilities’ mechanics are okay, Teleport especially is done really well with allowing the player room to breathe, but the cross laser really needs a targeting system or at least have it cross on the currently targeted area. It’s hard to tell which ability is currently up because the icons are all the same color and I have to move and keep track of the enemy and bullets, I ended up having to play a memory game, so perhaps having an extra UI that is not moving at the bottom corner of the screen that tells what ability is next would be better.
On the up side, the graphics are impressive and the deckbuilding is an interesting feature to allow the player to express themselves freely. I like being able to draw cards after accumulating enough energy and plan my moves that way. Having some dialogue in-between card draws also served well to make things more interesting. Even with all the problems I encountered, I could feel that this is a well-made game and still gets a good amount of praise from me for its creative direction, graphics, and mashup mechanics. Project: Rho has a ton of potential and I acknowledge its quality. It just needs a lot of polish and tweaking on various gameplay aspects which I’m sure can be addressed with time. Good job!