Yeah the grenade launcher is definitely the weakest one even IF you know that you can hold down the fire button to make it explode closer to you (which I feel like a lot of people did not realize). Though there being a weaker weapon doesn’t mess with the game as much as it might others, thanks to how you’re always switching weapons and how you have two different goals to work with (kicking hearts and clearing waves, and the grenade launcher is only weak at one of these). At first I had the launcher one-shot enemies but I felt like it would be such a shame if we couldn’t watch enemies get launched everywhere by an explosion which is why I made it weaker lol
cronch
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Thank you for the splashscreen animation and everything wonderful presentation and credits too! You certainly have your style. The way the mutations stack up on your character reminded me a lot of the player sprite chaos in games like the binding of isaac. At points the gameplay was definitely frustrating though, like with not being able to see where you’re going, and being caught off guard with a complete death sentence from the big fish coming to eat you up. Though the pain was definitely lessened by the silliness and getting to see the art.
The mutation mechanics were interesting, it’s always fun trying to optimize spending resources with that chance to get that reward you’re looking for. I felt like the potential for cool synergies was good too with the combination mechanic (though a few times I did lose all my crops that had the good trait combos on them due to the time running out). Trying out different trait combinations to see what happens has a bit of that engaging mechanic exploration in it. The turtles didn’t pose much of a challenge for me since I got lucky with the sour trait, but later on I did see how they brought some of that multitasking prioritization gameplay too. I will say though some mechanics felt overexplained while others felt underexplained at first, like how the description on itch.io explains how to use all the tools, but the game ended up already having a tutorial that explains everything intuitively. In contrast, I felt like I didn’t really understand the mutation points much at first. I just watched the points go down as I gambled for some cool traits. Most importantly though I ran out of mutation points completely after unknowingly spending most of them mutating the ultimate wheat only to lose out on all my seeds to the level timer and then have too few to buy new plants for the later levels.
phewwwww i beat it! there was a section here

that really messed me up, and most of the sections like this too were roadblocks for me. the game works like a precision platformer but the speed feels too high to be precise honestly. the jump gives a doodle jump kinda feel, it was cool that it often led to the jumps syncing up with the music, which was also a cool source of progression reminding, it was fun to get to see how the music would change each level, and same goes for the background, i just love reactive and dynamic stuff like this. i quickly got tired of hitting space with my left thumb and switched to using my other hand, i feel like having Z + arrow keys would have been good (that’s what celeste does and it works well). in the end there were some fun sections and some frustrating sections, which made me want to quit a few times but i still pushed through to the end. thanks for the video game
accidentally lost my screenshot but im preeetty sure i got 292 or 262 on my best run. this is an interesting game, it’s fun to plan out the best routes ahead of time and satisfying to see the ants carry out your plan, as well as to course-correct when they decide to go somewhere else because it’s closer. the rendering style is also really cool with the stacked sprites, i always wanted to do that ever since i watched that youtube video “the day of the dolly-mixture”. honestly the biggest problem was what seemed like a bug to me where the ants would all just become unresponsive until they died (though if i marked a new spot and it was close enough to them then they would go for it). i also don’t know if the ants getting completely stuck when one of their antmates dies in the middle of a tunnel due to a blockage was intentional but it was an issue i had to work around, which is good, though it also led to the aforementioned bug one time. anyways yay awesome thanksssss
even if it was a bit rough, i really like the risk of rain 2-esque crazy stat progression that can happen, the game even stuttered once because of how many times my projectiles split. I alos thought the chaos doctrine was a really interesting upgrade, the way it makes controlling the player harder, but gives you a lot of “stat currency” to trade into fire rate or damage














