A nicely scaled experience with some good design fundamentals.
PROS:
- Nicely forgiving hit boxes and timing for player attacks against the enemies. Definitely in the player's favor and makes me feel cooler than I am, lol.
- Nice use of looping level design to bring players back to the start after acquiring powers that open up other options.
- Enemies had some nice fluid movement to their pathing so they felt more natural and less robotic.
CRITIQUE:
- The attack animation for the player feels very slow and lacks impact as a result. You could cut probably the first 2-3 frames of animation from it and it would feel way more responsive. If you feel that's too jarring of a change in the character's posture you can add a smear to frames to better sell the motion that would cause that posture change.
- There aren't that many buttons used by the game, but I did need to remind myself which buttons I'd discovered each time I found a new button explanation on the walls. It would be nice if there were just on-screen HUD prompts that had the buttons for each action always in front of me to see.
- The "dodge" movement skill feels instantaneous right now, which is a bit jarring so I never really used it for fear of accidentally dodging too far off of platforms. Having the character move over a brief period with some kind of trail feedback to better let players track the exact distance and get a better feel for how the movement actually works would really help with the presentation of that skill.