Hi!
I wanted to talk about the things I already like about the game and some other things that I'm curious about/have critique about.
First of all the game feels incredible to play.
To move and to attack is an incredibly smooth experience.
The animations of both your character and the enemies is very endearing and gives them character. It's easy to tell when your enemies are about to attack because of the animations and effects, giving it a good level of visual clarity that lets the player know what's going on.
Also small mechanic details like: when you try to "uppercut" in the air in order to pogo jump onto an enemy in order to continue the combo and you MISS you instead get punished by having a lengthy animation of your character slowly trying to pry his sword from the ground. It rewards skill and makes you learn. Things like slicing arrows from mid-air rewards precise timing and gives players that have good reactions an advantage over others, which gives players a level of skill-expression and increases the skill range of the in-game mechanics making players play, not only because of how fun the game is, but also to get better at its mechanics. I'm sure some people will play for the optimization of mechanics such as these, the result of which might give leeway for an active speed-running scene and to me, that sounds quite exciting.
The enemy design is also quite solid, the first type of enemy: the "Skull Goblin" as I'll dub it from now on, only takes a few slices to kill and is meant to let you learn the game, ( the fact that the very first skull goblin, the one that kills the knight, has quite a lot more life than the others, which lets you try the combo prompts you get on the screen, is a very good form of a tutorial) the archers are the first ranged enemy you come in contact with so you get to know both base types of enemies very early on. (Also the archers have a small visual bug where when you move too fast, while they are aiming for you, they will grotesquely contort their arms behind their back while also still looking to the side)
The third enemy the: Female Goblin Brute (it looks female to me, because of the ear piercings, the big eyes and the red nose, this might have not been the intention and also not cannon to the lore, but they look quite cute and lets me imagine them even cuter if I think of them as such)
This enemy is very nice and probably the hardest enemy in the demo so far, more so than the boss even.
You cannot normal slice them while they are charging up their attack in order to stun them, neither can you pogo jump on them to stun them, the charge attack also doesn't work. The only way you can stun them is to uppercut them from the ground and combo them thereafter. But the uppercut move doesn't have the biggest AOE and so when trying to kill a big pack of enemies which consists of some other enemy types plus a female brute, or even worse, a full pack of female goblin brutes, then you need to start thinking about how you'll attack, instead of brainlessly mashing your attack button.
Also the fact that the two melee classes of enemies try to match you when you roll/dodge away and also periodically dodge when you look at them or after a set amount of time between their attacks, makes them feel more real and adds a level of difficulty to them.
Now lets get to the boss, the boss is pretty cool in design, but quite easy to beat in execution. His first attack: the long-winding axe swing that tracks pretty well and will actually most likely hit you if you try to dodge it while anywhere near him horizontally is not bad. Unfortunately its extremely easy to just dodge it vertically instead, where the little dash he gets in order to close the gap between you and him when he's exerting his axe attack is not even close to as big as your vertical roll. Also if he does hit you, then his attack doesn't do much more damage than your normal enemies and sort of invalidates his boss status. His other attack: the rally cry, is nice and fits into his character as Chieftan. The bulk of the difficulty that this boss has is trying to fight the boss around the troops he spawns instead of the boss by himself, if this is intended, then the boss fight is fine, maybe tune the damage numbers on his axe attack to be a bit higher, but if the boss is supposed to be hard by himself, then I would consider adding a few more mechanics.
(once, while I died fighting him, his troops also had a war cry and were enveloped in a red aura shine, if this is a hint to a mechanic which might buff the troops with each subsequent war cry the boss does, than that's pretty cool, but that's just speculation and might just be a victory cry upon killing the player, which is also pretty cool).
One last thing I want to talk about before I go into small things that might need fixing, is the dodge roll.
Personally I like the dodge roll a lot and yes it's obviously a way faster and more efficient way of travel instead of walking normally, but I think that's honestly just fine. It's fun to just roll around the entire map, it's fun to jump and roll in mid-air and to follow that up with a pogo jump onto an enemy into a full-combo etc. It might seem cheesy, but it's extremely fun to move around in this way and if it was nerfed in any way say: smaller distance of the roll or bigger cooldown, movement as it is in the game right now, which is one of most fun things in it currently, will be a bit less exciting in the future, also some enemies already accommodate themselves to you being able to roll this much, the melee enemies match your dodge roll and try to follow you if you go to far out. For speed-running and/or fun purposes I would leave the dodge roll as is right now.
If you would like to validate walking/running in another way, like for example a running slash than can only be done by running for a certain while without stopping before hitting an attack key, which does more damage and has a bit more stun than a normal slash, then maybe you could look into something like that. Also I just recently found out about the charge attack and the fact you can charge it up while midair, in the middle of a combo or while standing up from the ground is very nice and let's you get it off a tiny bit faster than if you would just start off charging it normally.
Small things, which might or might not need fixing:
- There is no potion counter in the browser version.
- The tutorial prompts completely disappear if you roll from the very beginning or only show up partly.
- If you choose quit in the browser version it will just freeze the game instead of going to the main menu screen.
- If you roll fast enough and kill the enemy before it kills the ally knight, you get to keep him as an ally with infinite health and the mobs completely ignore him, while he swings at things you also try to swing at. (?) Not sure if this is a bug, if it's a demo-only Easter egg then it's pretty cool.
- The aforementioned visual big with the goblin archer.
Overall the game runs really well both in the downloadable version and the browser, but these are some things I noticed.
Thanks for making this game, I can't wait for the next gameplay demo and I'm always down to test some more.
Good stuff and keep up the great work!
P.S.
I found out that the Chieftan actually makes the enemies war cry also while the player is still alive, not sure if this actually does anything, but it's pretty cool.
Also found a little secret that might or might not have to do with a "king" figure, pretty cool easter egg! Don't want to ruin it for others who might want to explore it themselves.
