Hmm I didn't quite see one on my first playthrough, hopefully it works out next time.

Ok that is very nice to know, will keep that in mind next playthrough.

Miracle Revolution | Kaxzer 6/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 6/6

Played both Standard and Hyper.

Gonna make lots of criticisms because I really like it and want it to be even better.

Very fresh and interesting gameplay loop. I quite enjoyed the absorb and release idea.

I did however find the absorb mechanic a bit finnicky at times, I think that the absorb radius shrinks as you hold it for longer which was really getting in the way of consistency, especially on Hyper attack 2 where I failed to fully absorb some of the flowers and the remnants would hit me. But even at full size I feel it can be a bit too small.

The hit stun also I feel is very disorientating, and especially without some visual hitbox rendering above bullets I sometimes found myself losing where the player was if they were buried under bullets.

Overall HP might be a tad high but it is partly from me at times playing fairly passive.

Attack 1

Nice introduction attack with great aggressive shotgun opportunities.

Attack 2

On Standard I think this attack works quite well, a little mixed on the poison flowers existing but otherwise fine.

On Hyper I found this attack to be by far the hardest. I tried my Stardard method of hugging the wall to be able to reach the stream at the bottom easier but I just found that to be completely unviable at this density and speed and found hugging the top of the screen to be more reliable, though absorbing the flowers still was a bit finnicky with the faster pace. But because I took the lame way the attack did last for way too long.

Attack 3

This attack is also just great on both difficulties. Using the slowdown to build up crazy large damage is very fun to do.

Attack 4

I feel this attack might be way too easy to just hold down Z and X to just be basically unkillable. It is at least quite pretty.

Visuals 6/6

The visual style is very pretty to where I have not much to say, its just really good.

Audio 5/6

The music selection is decent and the SFX is pleasant to listen to. Good sound direction. 

archetype:-1 | kobito 2/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Yeah this is indeed a prototype.

Gameplay 4/6

It's not very long but what's there seems pretty fun, the cancels are indeed very big.

Visuals 5/6

The visual direction is very solid and clean and the big cancels with all the numbers look great, and the item sprite is really nice too.

Audio 1/6

Literally no audio, I guess at the very least it didn't make my ears bleed.

Void Seekers | Makuta Matara 5/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 4/6

This game is absolutely wild man but like still kinda fun.

The twin-stick style is pretty novel and not something I play often so that was pretty fresh for me.

I won't lie and say I really understood what was happening on stages but the bosses I quite liked.

Visuals 5/6

It's got quite the style to it; pretty basic flat colours but it ends up working quite well. Boss design is very good too.

Music 5/6

Solid choice of music and the SFX is quite satisfying. I may not have understood what really was happening on stages but saving presents makes a satisfying sound so I go collect it.

Memorial Petals and Relentless Flames | Syoudre 6/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Holy fucking peak, this kind of entry is why I had to scale my ratings to make them seem very harsh. I want to say more but everything is just so good I can't really say much.

Gamplay 6/6

Played on Standard.

The maze mechanic was very cool though there was a little bit too much repeats.

All of that is just instantly made up by the bosses. All the patterns are just an absolute joy to play with.

Visuals 6/6

The game is an absolute spectacle to look at. Me like pretty. The artworks and having ending screens is very nice to see. Its very clear lots of effort and care was put in this game.

Audio 5/6

The music selection is very nice and elevates the experience greatly. SFX is also good and feels very responsive to what I do.

Cirno Ranger - Placeholder Label | Fumo Rin 4/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 4/6

Its quite fast paced and found it to flow quite nicely even if I needed to like actually learn the stages a bit.

Visuals 2/6

I mean I get it, they're placeholders. The presentations like the spell declaration though was pretty nifty.

Audio 6/6

Solid SFX and very nice music. Basically just perfect for me.

Ringo's Dango Rush | nolavthe 4/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 4/6

Pattern design is generally good, not much to say here for me.

Stuff does generally die way too fast though, a lot of the attacks just don't seem to be able to unfold because it just dies before it really begins.

September Pumpkin seems to be broken? Nothing was happening.

Edit: Replayed it and it did work this time.  Pretty decent attack.

Visuals 3/6

Visuals are fine but isn't anything special for me here.

Audio 5/6

September Pumpkin cover is cool to hear though could use a bit more work on the instrumentation. The SFX that's here is fine but could just use more.

Illusory spellweaver (UU submission) | Selene 4/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 4/6

Played on Regular Extra.

Game lagged quite a lot when playing on Firefox so had to pull out Chrome.

You really need to have a pause menu or some other way to quick restart. It is quite annoying having to reload the game to have to retry over some early game mistake.

Reimu

Holy hell she is just unusably slow.

Marisa

Now this is more like it.

Stage section I felt was a bit bland with lots of reuse but its like inoffensive and fast I guess.

All the boss attacks I quite liked, very thematically strong and fun to dodge.

The mirror attack seemed to have broke for me after I bombed. There was just nothing on the bottom half and I just died to invisible bullets; unless you're supposed to dodge by reading from the top of the screen which is just not really doable for me.

The Marisa copy spell was pretty rude to shoot where the telegraph wasn't but I guess it is pretty fitting and also funny.

Visuals 5/6

Its generally quite nice to look at, everything looks quite clean and art is nice. My only complaint is the BG perspective is kinda off and just could use a bit more touchup.

Audio 6/6

Very nice to listen to, music is great and SFX is nice.

BHA 10: You Only Get One | ABBurlap 5/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 5/6

Nice and quick, quite like the charge shot. The speedrunning concept I liked, and the short runtime did help with being able to spam lots of attempts to try for a faster time.

Visuals 5/6

Looks quite pleasant, nice spritework and artwork. My only complaint is that some of the particles that come off the player can be a bit distracting like the respawn glowy particles.

Audio 6/6

Music and SFX are very well done, just outright no complaints.

BHA 10 ~ Interdimensional Dreaming Kind | Tsuzyx 3/6

Disclaimer: I will be rating down 1 star to not IGN review stuff because itch.io does not have half stars and I want to be able to distinguish scores a bit more, and realistically nothing is going to be getting a 1 for real anyways. For Visuals and Audio I'm granting +1 star for significantly original content, i.e. not mostly F2U content, but most of the score will still be if its good and fits well.

Gameplay 3/6

Reimu route was very much too easy for me but I will try to rate the game trying to assume what it'd be like if it was hard. The other route definitely had some hard bits.

Took me a while to figure out how to start the game, that I needed to play Extra.

Reimu Route

I have no clue how you do the white fairy section, it seems you can press C and it like does stuff but didn't really quite understand.

Uh does homing just do the same damage as needles? Not gonna complain too much just kinda odd there doesn't seem to be much incentive to focus.

The hollow bullet nons I felt kinda just didn't do much, though the knife nons were decent.

The patterns for the most part were nice though that spinning spell legit nothing happens man.

Tsubakura Route

Yep it sure is longer.

I do feel that the unfocus shot didn't really kill very well. My instinct is to unfocus on crowds to deal lots of spread damage but nothing seems to be dying. Otherwise stage was fine.

Nons were standard and most of the spells were cool though there were some occasional crazy curveball crazy hard stuff.

Visuals 3/6

Background is pretty good though quite trippy it scrolling backwards. Otherwise just standard ZUN and Len'en stuff.

Audio 3/6

Could use some audio feedback on hitting stage enemies. Default sound mixing was a bit rough, SFX way too high compared to music. d

SFX is mostly just ZUN stuff which work fine.

Overall  4.5
Fun game (not biased because bullet hell lol).

Gameplay  4.5
Some patterns have some hiccups but overall solid. 
Stage is kinda nothing as it currently is.  
Minor gripe with how your character can fully hug the screen borders, I'm used to how official games have some margin so that your sprite is always mostly visible, just messes with muscle memory with bottomhugs.

Concept  4
It's a bullet hell, works perfectly fine but nothing revolutionary.

Visuals  5
Looks pretty.

Audio  3.75
Lack of music on stages, mixing and instrumentation on the boss theme could use some work.
The item pickup sound effect kinda got annoying for me.

Story / Writing  3
Not really much story (which yeah it was rushed at the end during crunch so it is understandable).

Challenge  4
It's enjoyably challenging, I do wish there was a harder difficulty than Arcade but it'll do.
The second attack sometimes is mega hard and sometimes mega easy which is a bit annoying.
Final attack rage phase kinda feels bullshit but that's kinda fun in it's own way.
Full attack review in appendix.

Theme Relevance  3
Same as the Story / Writing category, lack of any dialogue kinda makes it not have much of that.  Not completely lacking in the theming though.

Appendix:  Attack Reviews
Attacks were seen on Arcade

Attack 1
It uh sure is an attack.  Its either really hard if you're on the left and really easy if you're on the right.

Attack 2
The attack I had the most issue with.  The butterfly walls are pretty funky, sometimes you get really easy RNG and barely have to dodge them and other times they overlap in crazy ways.  If it was just consistently crazy I'd have been fine with it tbh.  Also it seems that the wave variation is dependent on the previous wave so if the first wave was crazy then so will the second wave most of the time.

Attack 3
This one is very fun, the RNG can be funky here too but in an exiting way, the funny walls make you do some macro dodges which are very fun to pull off.

Attack 4
Kinda similar to Attack 3 and Attack 5 but this one I feel is a bit weaker.  Overall being asked to move around a lot is fun.

Attack 5
Kinda very easy until the rage phase.  First 2 stages are just tapping left-right over and over again.
Phase 1 -> Phase 2 transition has a bit of a hitch that can catch you off guard if you're asleep, not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.
Phase 3 is nice, sort of reminds me of Hourai Jewel.
Phase 4 is lol, but I sort of like it being a bit bullshit.  Looks like hell to do as Rinnosuke/Remilia team.

The pew pew go brr