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LydiaE8 years ago

Pixel Soldier review:

Difficulty scales up quickly but effectively; with simple sound and graphics, it looks like you were able to focus on developing interesting/satisfying mechanics, and on that front this game really delivers. The effect of hopping around the screen to dodge bullets is made to be a bit more rewarding because it also improves the speed with which you can dodge enemy missiles, making a skilled player able to avoid taking damage while knocking out the challenges set before them.

Supports a waves/ boss style; I'd say something a little clearer in the game itself about what the controls are might be helpful, the first time I was sure what all my options were was after I decided to try remapping them to see if I was missing anything. (They are in the gamepage though so that is helpful as well).

Music and graphics are a bit on the simple side but I feel like that suits the game's style and contributes to the overall gameboy feel. Bosses drop health boosters but I didn't see any power-ups along the way, I'd say that's what I want out of potential future additions to this game's development: the ability to shoot different projectiles, more of them, etc, as a direct result of the bosses killed and such to keep the gameplay robust as players progress.

Overall I'd give it a 4/5 stars, especially considering it's a GBJam game but looks rather polished.

My game is The Curse of Talon Cyphyr

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Accidently Awesome8 years ago

Thanks for the great review. You mention many important points. Yeah we focussed on game play over graphics. But sadly the music/sounds were a last minute addition so they might not have turned out that good.

Some tutorial for controls would have been necessary, and reading your text I'm not even sure if we properly communicated that the player is invincible while dashing. Powerups and different weapons were planned from the beginning, but cut due to time constraints and I wasn't sure how/when they should drop, but you gave me an idea how to integrate them, without the enemies randomly dropping them.

Tuning the difficulty is always difficult, because I usually played the game already hundreds of times until it's finished, so I just included multiple difficulties (with a third one, that only even unlocks after you beat it on "Hard"), but I think I could have done more, like allowing the player to retry directly at the boss they died at instead of the beginning, at least on lower difficulty settings. But I thought it isn't a big issues since the game is rather short with 3 stages and can approximately be played through in ~7min (in a single run).

Ok, this turned out longer than expected. To conclude: thanks again for the helpful review.

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