3.0 hours played
Written 3 years ago
Neat little game with innovative ideas and design-choices. A little bit rough around the edges, well worth a try if you’re interested. See the suggestion portion for some more info regarding aspects that are potentially flawed.
[b]Pros[/b]
• Innovative gameplay.
• Unexpectedly good music every now and then, it just goes off and is great.
• The core mechanics are very well made and feels great to play around with.
Roguelite mechanics where you can permanently unlock parts, always fun with a bit of roguelite.
[b]Cons[/b]
• The story and surrounding aspects are quite rough around the edges.
• The pacing of the music is a bit too varied, doesn’t set the mood properly. For example, when racing a bunny, the music was slow and then all of a sudden it went into a chant that gave an impression of a tense moment and increase of pace, then it just died out and left a bit lacklustre moment; The music built up to nothing.
[b]Suggestions[/b]
1. Have tutorial windows on the left side instead of the right side. Currently the tutorial windows are obstructing coin pickups which can potentially cause the player to skip the tutorial windows to get a better look at the coins. They cause more harm than help as they stress new players and confuse.
2. The “cinematics” which are conversations should have a way to hop through quicker, currently you can only skip the entirety of the cinematic which might not be to one’s wish. This might just have been the first intro-cinematic though, the rest of the dialogues can be quickly read through.
3. Having the controller bindings visible in blueprint-phase gives the impression that one is able to construct the vehicle with it, but it appears multiple functionalities aren’t available through the use of controller which forces one to use keyboard and mouse. This presents the following questions: Why should I play with controller when I am forced to use KB&M either way? The partial controller support is accurate, but it feels a bit odd that *some* of the construction aspects are supported and some aren’t.
4. The game speaks of a schedule, the player is not shown this in a well thought out way. Maybe display a more visual timetable to give the player a better view of how one can strategize the use of time. For a game that encourages speed and optimal time-use, I didn't see any obvious way to get a good feel for how much time I had to work with. The game said "You're X time ahead/behind", but this was very abstract as I didn't really know how much I had to work with in the whole. How much is two hours behind relative to how many hours in total? How long time left?
5. Recharge indicator for objects. It’s difficult to plan on how to move without indicators on parts. Nothing big, maybe just a small meter on the object that progressively fill depending on recharge. This is also something the player themself plans, so it might be a design-choice to exclude this as it encourages planning in a different way. If this is the case, maybe give the player some more info regarding the parts? Recharge time in seconds when in blueprint phase or maybe the possibility to run around in blueprint phase and activate the parts to see their recharge time and effect. Might be in the game already but with me missing it.