If half the time spent on making creative map layouts were spent making the interface user-friendly and adding missing options, this game would be excellent. Why can't you restart a map? Why can't you drop to the stage select from in game? Why do you have to have 'focus' on the main play area for 'T' to work? Why isn't there a hotkey for advancing waves? There's a lot of great ideas here, unfortunately they're wrapped up in an interface that makes the game feel far clunkier than it needs to.
Could really stand to have some more content than the single main quest chain and, what, 2 sidequests? But it's Hands of War without that incredibly stupid reputation grinding, so that's a plus.
Ehhh. You get an A for effort--I know firsthand that a good deal of work must have gone into the design of the bullet patterns, but there's just a lot wrong with it. You may as well not even have keyboard control, because some of these patterns can't be reasonably avoided with arrow keys (one of the final boss' in particular, and the level 7 boss), and while sure, there's lots of upgrades, outside of the final boss nothing is worth upgrading other than the homing missiles because you're so rarely able to focus fire on them between their movement and their shields. And the nearly-unavoidable homing missiles + danmaku is just a stupid, stupid idea. 3/5, good but could have been better.
Put the mute button somewhere in the game instead of just on the menu, and add a confirm dialogue for going back to the menu. I don't appreciate having to start a level over because I decided I didn't want to listen to the game's music over.
It's like taking a game like Uncharted Waters and combining it with the boat travel from Zelda: Wind Waker. You end up getting a trading/pirating sort of game with long stretches of horribly boring travel. If the combat were even marginally interesting it'd be alright, but "shallow" doesn't even begin to describe it. It -would- be well-made if not for the sometimes game-breaking bugs, and it'd be nice if you didn't have to wait for the menus to shift around whenever you got into or left a fight. Too slow moving, too shallow. Close to a good game, but just...boring.
I liked it. Only thing is, I realize it'd be hard to do anything about it on some levels, but a way to get rid of instantly dying on restarting a level if you're in the wrong place would be nice.
This may not be the most entertaining game in the world (it's alright though), this game does pretty much everything right. The graphics are functional and good looking, the music and sound is unobtrusive, fitting, and can be turned off, the controls work great and are set up for the player's convenience (no switching between controls between levels!) Nice job.
From your description you don't seem to care what your players think, but I'll say it anyway: When we want to listen to our own music, your little solution of muting the whole computer doesn't help.
If there was more variety to the gameplay then it'd be an alright game. As it is, its trivially easy, awfully repetitive, and lacks key features (pause, mute, _save_). I started lagging really badly after a few plays, so there might be a memory leak in it somewhere. Really good art, and I'd like to see it become something better, as it is I wouldn't have even considered releasing it though.
Ah; I recently had a keyboard go bad and switched to an older one. Upon checking, yep, it's this keyboard, not the game. And yes, I know its a rush job, just saying for if you do more games.
I see its a school project, but if you're going to go on and continue making games: Up and Left do not work at the same time--I'm guessing the controls are if/else statements? That shouldn't be. Also, if you're going to draw/paste in your own graphics, you need to learn how to make transparent backgrounds for them. Look at how there's a white border around every graphic that you added.
Pretty good, definitely one of the better arena shooters out there. I have to just shake my head at the upgrades and "Achievements" though. The upgrades are almost completely linear, meaning they may as well not exist at all and just have the character gain power as they level. The achievements are the sort of stupid things that you'll obviously accomplish as you play, so why even bother? The whole thing with the screen shaking when you shoot things is a terrible idea as well. But, on the whole, it's an entertaining game, big improvement over Cell Warfare. 3/5
A great example of how to ruin your game concept. Why can you go outside the stage where you can't see your character and probably ram into things that kill you? Why are enemies that shoot at you and especially those that launch other enemies able to do so off the stage where you can't stop them? Why isn't there a pause button?
The core gameplay here is decent--the combat is reasonably fun, the programming is well done. The command buffer works really well. The problem is, the game overstays it's welcome something awful. The campaign is too long for how little variety there is, and even the individual fights are the same thing repeated ad naseum. A solid effort, if nothing spectacular, dragged down by its length.
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