The game is wonderful so far. The animations and mechanics give a strong sense of physicality. The movement is nuanced and addictive. The destructible buildings create glorious moments where I barely have time to notice the city is falling apart. Thank you for nice tutorials, lots of options, and a simple but deep experience.
Here are some pain points. I feel that ironing these out will make your work go farther.
- Load times. I see anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes for the level to load. I think it gets worse the more missions you do on the same instance.
- Aircraft AI. Either they ram into a corner immediately, or they barrel through buildings unpredictably at crazy speed. So either they look dumb, they're disproportionately deadly, or both, depending on luck. Maybe they could stick to clear paths near the streets, and fire laterally, rather than charging directly at me regardless of obstacles?
- HUD contrast. Night is fine, but daylight is unplayable because I can't see the HUD. I guess that's customizable, but that's not something I should have to do manually just to play normally.
- The "low health" siren. It's just too much. And when I die, it continues blaring annoyingly until the level finally unloads.
- Stats UI. It took me days to discover there's more stats if you click & drag. Give me a scroll bar, and scroll wheel input.
- Audio dropoff. The cockpit view is amazing, but suddenly the sound effects are really loud because the gun is right next to my virtual ear. Normalize the volume of player sounds out to a longer distance.
Here is my wishlist. I feel these are the most obvious next steps to make the game more complete:
- Results screen. How far did I get? What killed me? Get me excited to go again.
- Waypoint to the elevator. After the wave is over, there's a period of wandering around just looking for the hatch. I don't feel this adds to the experience.
- Variety in the environment. In such a fast-paced game, regularity helps the player recognize what they're seeing... but a few more terrains and buildings will add a lot of interest.
- More explanatory text. The 'body' menu has nice tooltips. Do that on the other menus. The multi-floor feature is cool but it took me days to discover it because I didn't understand what 'map length' means, so I left it on unlimited.
Keep going! Keep it simple! Take my money!