Firstly, I would like to just praise the game concept. I love playing shooters and bullet hell games, and this might just take the crown for the coolest one. I played around 3 rounds in total, one lasting almost an hour and a half, and I have a collected some critiques, and things that I enjoyed:
Bad things:
1. The game needs more optimization. I luckily have a pretty beefy computer (RTX 3060, Intel i7-12700K, and 16 gigs of DDR5 ram), but after a certain point my average frame rate went from well above 1000 fps, all the way down to ~30, with lows of 10. The main contributor was the money sitting on the floor, as I had level 32 wealth, and the money just piled up. Additionally the green bubble enemies contributed towards lowering frames. Mabey simply decreasing the number of money on the ground, and reducing the number of green guys that spilt would help with that.
2. Endgame needs major work. The first 30 minutes feel very clean and enjoyable, but it gets to a point where the upgrades are too overpowered and it gets to be too easy. Increasing the difficulty of enemies in a different way, or adding new enemies and specific time chapters might be a way to improve this.
3. The game needs to be more balanced. I think that the cost scaling for upgrades is really good, especially with things as powerful as multi-shot, but with the addition of manifest (which I actually really thought worked well), you could easily by pass that cost increase, and buy both multi-shot and health. Around the hour mark of one of my runs, health upgrades were 5,000,000 and multi-shot was 500,000, I could just bypass saving up for that by spending stars. A simple fix would be to just limit how many of each of the upgrades you can spend stars on. So maybe only 3 times can you use stars for multi-shot, or make the stars needed to upgrade grow exponentially. Additionally, I loved the other upgrades you could buy with stars, but out of the three (the one that increased your screen size for a time, the one that drained heath in a box, and the one that allowed to see a bit of the screen away from you) only the one that increased screen size was viable, as the other two were too technical or underpowered. I would love to see some more viable ones, though the ideas for the other two were interesting. Mabey just buffing them or making them automatically move around to track enemies would help.
4. Some of the visuals need to be modified. Set distinct colors to the enemies bullets and yours so you won't mix up what you need to dodge. Some bosses shot white bullets, other shot green and other things like that.
Good things:
1. I absolutely loved the boss design, there were just enough unique bosses to stay interesting, but not too many so I could remember how to beat each one. All of the bosses I would give 5 stars to, except I would say for the smiley face boss, having the setting for it to stay the top window should be toggled by default.
2. The graphical design was really amazing, loved the style and execution of it.
3. Overall the game was really nice to play, felt very polished and enjoyable to stick with for nearly one and a half hours.
Final notes:
I just want to say that the game in the current state is absolutely amazing, and with some slight changes it could easily place in my top games. Something like permanent upgrades outside of the main game to keep me plaguing again and again. I really hope to see the game on steam, and would absolutely encourage anyone who has not picked it up to try it. 5 star A+ game, keep up the good work.
Game screenshot:
