Love the idea of a no-danger tower defense. It's like literal farming, you plant the monsters, and harvest :)
It's not quite finished, but hey, it's free and it's fun. Hope to see more from the developer in the future.
I live in Denmark, and I just realised that a single gem costs around $0,15... making it more valuable than the physical currency in my country. Seems a bit much.
A fast time travel is more expensive in real-world money than a large coffee at Starbucks. Upgrading my armory would cost 500 gems... or I could buy GTA V instead, and still have money for two pizzas, literally.
I've been playing a while now, but I no longer see any ways to progress..
The candyland event got me from around 30 million to 750 million orbs, now I can get up to 18 million per run. That would mean 14 long-as-possible grind-runs, just to get to the next milestone of 1 billion (which unlocks a significant bonus). The unlocked bonus will probably get me 20 zones further... and there are about about 500 more to go in area 4. Counting diminishing returns... I can't calculate how many years it would take to get through that area.
Guess I'll just wait for another event or something.
Pretty cool game, very nice looking, but I do have some issues with the mechanics.
1. Why is stuff like taunting a typing game, and fighting something akin to Dance Dance Revolution? Surely you can come up with something that maps better to these actions. Also, the fighting minigame doesn't scale well at all, you can get a perfect score almost every time. On the other hand, I haven't been able to get a "brutal" score more than once on the typing game, and I'm not a slow typer.
2. It seems pretty odd that I can surround an enemy unit that has maybe 50 troops in it, and my two units have a combined total of 1000 troops, and I still lose 50-or-so troops myself. What's the point in even trying to be tactical about it, if it's just an exchange of units anyway?
3. Unit order overview and general control could be smoother.
Still, very cool game :)
Painfully plagiarizing of the Fallout 2 mythology, misspelled or incorrect text on almost every screen, clunky UI, every action is incredibly slow to perform, and you can't even quit a battle. Also, no retrain of skills, so if you build wrong, you'll have to start all over. Thanks a lot game.
If this was way smoother, I would find out if the mechanics are actually fun... but it isn't, so I won't.
It's unfortunate that the scout spam strategy is so important... kind of ruins the balancing. Ions and scouts can defeat any enemy really...
Also, the diff curve is kinda off, first few levels are easy (as they should be), next few are very hard, then when you get the right upgrades, the game gets easy again.
These tutorials are great. Well written, in a language anyone can understand, covering the basics you need to write interactive code with no messing around. Now in AS3 version as well. Awesome!
Braid meets University of Washington, music by the Six Parts Seven :)
Very cool concept, though it would have been cool to have a more exciting jump mechanic... it's pretty much all you do in the game, so it would be nice to expand a bit more on that.
This game goes to show how well defined this genre has become. Solid execution, and many good choices for upgrades, enemies, powerups, ...
Might make sense to have the chain go up by collecting pixels instead of hitting enemies, as that would make the chain go up much faster at higher (more difficult) levels, and also solve the problem that the best way to build a chain is to simply not collect pixels. Seems counter-intuitive.
Obviously, this is a blatant rip of Advance Wars, which is fine. Battalion should be judged on it’s innovations from there.
Most importantly, it's free. I'm impressed by how much general polish this has, despite being totally free of charge. The sound is sub par though. The music is not good enough to carry the repetition, and the explosion sounds are too loud and ugly. After all, explosion sounds are probably the single most used sound effect in the game!
The multiplayer and co-operative features sound absolutely awesome! I think those modes will be the key features for this game to stand on it's own.
I can’t discuss balancing and gameplay from this small peek, but I do think the interface is clunky. 3 clicks to build or repair could be reduced to 2 clicks, and clicking to move the map around feels cumbersome. Maybe a (right?)-mouse-button drag, or even just some keyboard hotkeys?
All in all, great effort and big things on the horizon.
Well, it seems like you've got a pretty solid framework for a classic RPG type game. The next step is to make an actual game out of it.
It obviously has a lot of small quirks and oddities, but most of it is easily remedied. Some of the things I noticed are:
- the sound needs leveling out. As in so many other flash games, the sfx are just way too loud.
- there needs to be a short, concise walkthrough of the game's menues and functions, *in-game*. You can't expect players to read the help-documentation. Some touch-ups to easy the usability of the GUI would be very nice too, and partially tackle the problem.
- As others have noted, there is way, WAY too much text in the game. When writing, you should evaluate each line and constantly ask yourself "Why is this line of dialogue in the game? What is it's justification?". You risk that people simply won't read it at all, which makes for all the more wasted effort.
The concept is fun enough, but the game has some pretty critical flaws. Take a level like one of the last ones:
In order to beat the level, the player has to anticipate what waves will be coming. Since there's no way to do that, the only solution is to try, die, try again, die again, and so on, until you memorize the timing. That makes for a pretty weak game experience the first many times in the trial and error cycle. Possible solution might be to include an overview of the enemies approaching without being able to attack them before they enter the screen.
Another problem with the game, which in my opinion is more severe, is the "forgivingness" of the game. It has NONE. On the last two levels, if you miss your timing by just a few seconds you will most likely lose the entire level. This means that half of the time you're repeating what you already know will work, and the other half you're just waiting for the level to end so you can start over. Back to drawing board.
A few simple suggestions:
Level out the sound effects. The explosions are MUCH too loud.
The are where you grab the "ball" is too small. It should be hard to hit the enemies, NOT fire the weapon. Increase the hitzone over the ball weapon, and voila - you have a (slightly) better game.
Very nice concept, definitely a lot of potential... potential is a nice word for improvement. The puzzles were really good, but a lot of the time I felt frustrated that I couldn't tell what a door (or several doors at once) would do before actually trying them. That makes it awfully hard to "puzzle" your way out of the problems, and instead you have to get by with trial and error. That's a more severe problem than you might immediately suspect.
Also, the game could use some general polishing, but honestly, I think the current simplicity (two colors, four shapes and what, three sound clips?) has a pleasant aesthetic in itself.
Fun enough game, but hey - so is Luminara, right? This game is an almost 1 to 1 ripoff, except worse in every way. That doesn't make it a horrible game though. Still, it's buggy, it's been done before (better), and where's the option to mute the soundtrack? Or the sound all-together?
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