The campaign has some of the wrong kind of bugs. The knife stops working after throwing. It's most obvious on the knife training mission. Auto-select works poorly in melee range. It switches to ranged weapons even when the cursor is very close to the melee target. Bug hives will often force a switch to RPG even though the cursor is nowhere near them. Many times I tried to swing a knife at a bug in the middle of the screen and launched a rocket to nowhere. The sniper rifle comes up at inconvenient times too. Close targets should always get priority weapon selection. There's also a rare bug that causes weapons to stop reloading and become unselectable. It might be caused by reloading at a transition point like the end of a wave. Finally, the training missions weren't giving out enough experience, especially for the final rifle and machine gun. I had to play the machine gun mission five times with perfect scores to reach the minigun. The final sniper rifle needed three or four.
The biggest problem with auto-switch is it's unpredictable. When I click the mouse, I'm trying to fire a shot. Auto-switch doesn't fire, so I don't hit whatever I was aiming at.
I have to agree with the collision criticisms. A healthy rocket can brush against an obstacle at low speed, get stuck, and explode a few seconds later. It's worst in space, where you can't come to a stop in time if you're traveling at a decent speed.
Radar is essential for most of the game. It should be a standard upgrade at the bottom of the shop page, not a 3 slot add-on. The best radar could also show different size red dots depending on obstacle, and even replace dots with arrows to show their direction of movement.
Otherwise this is one of the best launch games around.
Money slows to a crawl in the second half. Enemies are far apart, they have high hit points, and the best weapons have slow travel times. The combo timer runs out faster than you can kill anything, which keeps the multiplier near 1. And the top weapon is useless without the fire rate upgrade. The only reasonable option is to grind middle levels for high multipliers. The hit point jump and equipment costs are so high near the end that it feels like several intermediate levels are missing.
Sniper is the best upgrade, hands down. He'll hit stuff off screen before it ever fires at you. Then try to max squad size, reinforcement, and speed. A couple points in health and magnet should be enough.
Enemy bullets persist for too long. It's too easy to run into a stray shot fired 10 seconds earlier. They should evaporate after a few seconds.
Elevator levels in platformers are going to seem so boring now.
Game is click-heavy toward the end, but I can't think of a way around that. Occasionally it's frustrating when a crowd of powerful shooters is unreachable behind higher enemies. A very limited breakthrough-on-demand ability would be useful.
Not the best shooter of all time, but solid all around. This sort of game is difficult to play with mouse controls in a browser, because it's too easy for the mouse to leave the game window and stop the ship dead. A solution for that would make the game more fun.
Player's bullets are handled perfectly. Enough presence to see where they're going at all times, but not so strong that they conceal enemy shots.
Income seems very inconsistent. A huge combo earns 1000, or a moderate sized group of planes earns 15,000. This is with the 150% income bonus. Makes the grind to final set of upgrades frustrating.
Otherwise, great chain reaction game. Lots of fun to watch it unfold.
Mouse control has the same problem I've seen in other mouse shooters. Whenever the real cursor position leaves the game borders, the ship stops moving. Since the cursor is invisible in the game, it's impossible to predict, leading to lots of damaging pauses any time the ship strays too close to a border.
I realize a lot of people are big fans of upgrades. Otherwise Upgrade Complete wouldn't be so popular. But in this case my own opinion is that the upgrades take away from the great gameflow of the original Moby Dick. Eat people, grow bigger, faster, stronger, without interruption. Now we have to bump up the stats in tiny increments, and growing larger does nothing for health or other logically connected attributes. It's like playing Pac-Man with an upgrade screen every 100 dots.
If you have to put upgrades in this game, a good compromise would be a skill tree popping up between fights, or an upgrade path scheme like the one Bubble Tanks uses.
It would also be nice to see nets prepared by the crews before they're dropped. They're hard to avoid and devastating if they catch you under several cannon ships. This was my biggest complaint with the original.
First game is one of my all-time favorites, and this one doesn't throw that away. Hope you keep refining the concept.
Feels like Talesworth Arena with more reflexes and less waiting. Click detection feels off, though. It's consistently behind where the arrow appears to be.
Love extended bossfights. Few things for this one. Upgrade screen dumps you back to the action without a pause to let you get your bearings. Bullets and obstacles are tiny and too similar to the starfield, not unplayably but enough to cause eyestrain. Jerky framerate on my computer contributed to that. And the attack patterns don't feel like they're connected with the boss. Too random, and not in an Ultimate Crab Battle way. But I still enjoyed it, please keep developing.
I appreciate your feedback a lot, although I'm confused about the framerate - could you tell me your computers data and what the framerate is? (press "^") It runs fairly well on my mobile phone even..
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Yes, they are. We had just an ambiguity in level 24 but fixed it now. So every puzzle has just one solution.