BTW Cursed damage is based on STR, and a Vampire can get healing from it, which is great because you often hit a creature's weakness, generating more damage and more healing. STR also boosts the damage of Cirtical Strike, as it's a weapon skill more than a spell. INT boosts the damage of other spells, but yeah... Cursed damage and Critical Strike use STR and weapon damage as their base. Combine them on a Cursed for some nice healing... unless you randomly use an attack the critter's immune to! ;)
Level 25 Vampire Cursed, I just pulled a boss surrounded by a swarm of monsters. All I had was Charm. First, I Charmed the boss, who immediately turned around and attacked another monster. The rest rushed me. I Charmed the critter in front so they had to run into him and he turned around and started attacking the next mob, which made a bit of a roadblock. I ran a couple rooms away and nothing followed but the boss, who had broken charm and wanted to give me loot. Really, dealing with swarms of creatures isn't that hard if you just plan ahead.
Also, if you need "crowd control", then set a vine field beforehand (you can out run critters if you can get and stay ahead long enough), or try to entangle the ones you don't want and let your target chase you 2-3 rooms away, or just Charm the extras. You CAN charm more than one. On a related note, Bonemaster is turning out to be a hassle, as skels I want to kill get charmed instead and I have to wait for it to wear off before I can attack them. =/
Incidentally, if it hasn't been said yet, a Cursed melee attack still counts for Vampire healing, even though it's a random element. This gives me quite an edge in self healing while attacking.
Useless class types: Any that give you extra stats, armor, hp, mana. All of that can be made up with gear, so even Cursed isn't a disadvantage. Next: Anything that gives you a skill. Skills can be gotten on gear, so the benefit is lost pretty early on. Useful classes/races? Ones with resists... lets you spend less time looking for resist gear and more time looking for gear with stats/skills, a boon down the line (Golem, Human, Celestial, Atlantean, Demon in rough order of race, Cursed, Wanderer, Explorer, Hunter for classes)... and ones that give you scaling innate abilities. For races, this is the Vampire, maybe Demon (fire damage can be resisted, but his does scale as he grows more powerful), perhaps the Werewolf (does his regen scale with level/stats?) and Celestial (-20 fire res., but +60 other resists. Does his benefit scale as heals get more powerful?). For classes, this would be just the Cursed and maybe the Duelist (if his bonus damage scales and he can get singles).
There's no reason to NOT use autofire, so may as well take manual fire out of the game, maybe give the spacebar a special ability we can upgrade too, perhaps a different upgradeable special for each weapon type. This would also improve the value of such achievements as "play 240 minutes" or "earn 2.5 million upgrade points". Increase the length of levels if you upgrade the weapons, though, or it'll trivialize the game, and maybe add a few more levels and enemy types. Acid and Pulse are rather hard to use accurately and well. Nice game, though, a great start. I'll give it 4/5
Played time achievements are completely unreasonable. 240 minutes?!? Nobody is going to play this game that long! Also, could use ability to swap weapons mid-combat. Lasers take a TON of grinding, even on stage 13, to max, but you'll really want those defensive lasers maxed to create holes in enemy shot swarms to get through. Missiles are hard to use, even early, until you get their speed and turning speed boosted to at least 3 or 4 each... after that, they're great for the early game, sad you'll be mid-game before you can really make use of them. The allies can't hit the broad side of a barn unless either there's a lot of barns, the barn sits still for 30 seconds or said barn is two millimeters away, at which point I'm probably taking damage, and their bullets are SLOW, so if the barn is running away the bullet won't catch it... give them instant-hit pop lasers instead (ie not continuous damage lasers) even if you have to reduce shot speed or damage. Okay, enough about barns...
Something has been broken in the update. Used to run smoothly for me, but now it staggers and eventually goes to a black screen. I'm takin a star away until it's fixed. Don't worry, that still leaves you with a 3/5
Also, could use a save function (at least autosave every floor) so titles can be gotten from progression if the game crashes, a shop would be handy, and key functions.
Titles are basically achievements, with benefits. It'd be verra nice if you could see the qualifications for them! And yes, this game could use badges, maybe based on the easier and harder titles to get!
I can't reliably connect, it locks up on loading after I attempt to join a few games, successful or not. And I'm on the pipe equivalent of an eight-lane highway.
I laughed a lot! =D Simple game, funny writing. Could use more character ability development, and treasure to buy upgrades. Since this is just chapter 1, I hope that's what they're working on next. Here's hopiing! 4/5
Ultimate weapon seems to be the crossbow due to it's ability to hit multiple target or one target multiple times with one shot... rendering the finger and fire breath obsolete, as finger can only hit a target once per shot and fire breath leaves you vulnerable because you can't move. This becomes apparent against any large creature (like bosses) and is unfortunate because no-one will use the later weapons except in rare circumstances. Arena is a bit smallish. My advice: make arena a little bigger, make finger add multiple parallel lasers per shot with ranks 3 and 5, make fire breath not require you stop or make it consume projectiles as well. Also, consider making the crossbow do less damage but fire homing shots at rank 5 (or higher if you add ranks). Add the ability to collect potions and use them at the player's discretion. Add occasional short-duration power boosts like rapid fire or fast walk. All in all a passable but not exceptional example of the genre. 3/5.
While spamming the ifle at Greys near my wall, they overran me and I died. The menu popped up right where I was clicking and suddenly I'm starting over again at day 1. Not pleasant. The fact that the game hates on you if you don't spend points exactly as planned doesn't help either. Nice try, butneeds a lot of work. 2/5
Kreds are still easy to get with no money, so people need to stop bugging out about it. The bigger bug that should be addressed is that, if you spend Kreds on this game, the stuff you buy does not actually unlock. I've spoken to NinjaKiwi about this and there is simply no fix coming... so if you spent Kreds on BTD4, you can just write them off because you're not getting them back.
@aerion and others who didn't like my comments: It's all about feedback. I liked the game concept enough to rate it 4 out of 5 and figured some good input would help LordTim if he updates the game or decides to create a sequel. If you don't like it, well, I have great confidence in your ability to get over it, but you seem to have misinterpreted the purpose of my input in light of the rating I gave it, and may want to take another look.
To everyone else: It's fun! Play it!
There's a ton of 1 square mobs and a ton of four square mobs but only three non-drake two square mobs, which is vaguely disappointing. Creatures should get damage mods, if only based on their size in the game... for instance, a Kraken's bite should do more damage than a Turkey's. Perhaps give two square mobs a +.5 damage mod and four square mobs double damage, again, modified by more involved strong vs/weak vs effects. And perhaps more settings with some critters stronger in some settings (like druids and ents are stronger in forests, knights and normal humans in town/city, undead/necros in graveyards, dragons get no setting bonus because they're already awesome).
All in all, though, I gave it a 4 =)
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