Hello! I've been playing the game on my Steam Deck and I'm enjoying it very much. I just beat the second boss, and I'm very interested in what's next! I'm a huge metroidvania fan, and Howling Irons has definitely peaked my interest. I love the idea of the gunfights, as well as the rings to modify each gun on its own I have done feedback about the game and the overall experience:
- When respawning after death, players should get fully charged guns and 100/100 ammo. Otherwise, what every player will do immediately after dying will always be empty their guns, reload, and then rest to get full ammo. It's worth streamlining that.
- The dash feels a bit sluggish and hard to be relied upon. Since you lose some height when dashing, and unless you're perfectly over a platform you won't land on it, there's been times when I haven't been able to judge properly my jumps and I've ended up falling into a pit.
- The player's character should face the direction he's walking, even if the aim cursor is pointing the other way, and then he could turn if you start shooting. Especially when playing with a gamepad, it feels like you have to be using both sticks to walk properly in the right direction.
- The combat still feels a little bit stiff, the enemies don't have many moves (which is not a bad thing in itself), and having the guns mostly trivializes every enemy that does not have a ranged attack.
- The second boss (the lizard warrior) was hard to fight because the columns in the arena hide a lot of the telegraphed start of an attack, so it's very difficult to react (also the main character being hidden behind the columns doesn't help figuring out where are you and how to beat react). I did manage to beat the boss on my second attempt because of some sort of bug where he stopped moving at all, and I could unload all of my ammo without a care in the world.
I don't want to sound too critical with the game, I'm having good fun playing it and I'm excited about the final product because I think it has a lot of potential.
I'll be keeping a close eye on this project, because it's really cool!!