itch.io

I played the older demo a while back and have also dropped my criticisms on that one, so I'll do the same here.

Compared to last time, the physics are definitely improved from last time. Jumping is a lot less momentum heavy, and the wall jumping is no longer as commital as before. They're still a bit rough, though: jumping has you go up pretty slowly, but then go down like a stack of rocks; and then wall jumping has you cling on on the wall and won't let go unless you manually get off it via jumping or pressing down (i think, i might've misremembered), which is not awful, per se, just very unusual.

Shooting has been improved as well, now the character can properly rapid fire like it would in Mega Man, though the bullets move pretty slow and take a while to vanish off-screen, making it still annoying to rapid fir, but at least to a manageable degree. The new (?) charge shot, however, is quite awful.

For one, it takes a while to fully charge up, which wouldn't be a problem if you could fire a shot when not fully charged, but you can't. You don't get a semi-charged shot, not even a normal uncharged pellet, just nothing comes out, which is massively annoying, since often I have nothing come out when I release the moment the enemy decides to make itself vulnerable because my buster was a fraction of a second away from fully charging. On the flipside, I also obliterated the miniboss with like, three charged shots, so maybe look into balancing that as well.

And then there's the new dash. You can't dash jump, so I barely used it.

Overall, quite a let down. In the 8 months that passed since that original demo, the game improved very little, graphically and mechanically, and still has jank, and the level design in this demo is much less interesting than the previous one.

Cute game. Artstyle is charming and pleasing and the music is pretty nice (though maybe it should be a little bit more upbeat), and the level design itself is simple, yet fairly challenging right from the onset. Bosses are intimidating at first, but they can still be learned and beaten with enough experience. Bit of an odd compliment, but I love how you actually ascend from jumping off of ladders, and can just monkey back and forth between them.

The game isn't without issues though. Now, I prefer Mega Man's lack of aerial momentum, so playing a game clearly inspired by that series apply it threw me off a bit. But it's something I eventually got used to, even if the converyor belts made it pretty annoying in that second stage.

I can also get behind a wall jump that doesn't let you climb walls a la MMX and simply pushes you off the wall like in Mario. What I can't get behind is that when you jump off a wall, you cannot alter your jump arc until you land, which makes it more commital than I feel needs to be.  Also, when you stick to a wall, you're clinged to it even if you let go of the directional button, and having to press down to get off a wall felt clunky. I also don't like how holding jump when you stick to a wall makes you automatically jump off from it. This, combined with the already commital jump, makes it very easy to accidentally launch yourself into whatever you were trying to avoid to begin with.

Lastly, and by far my biggest gripe, the arm cannon. For some reason it refuses to rapid fire on command. Attempting to do so will cause my character to just fire one shot, then fire after I already started falling. This makes any situation where I have to defeat an enemy at a higher altitude than me a gigantic pain, since I'm stuck with just firing at an opponent one shot at a time, which honestly would be less irritating if my character couldn't rapid fire at all.

But yeah, if you plan on work on this further, I'd love to see the results. This has potential to be a great experience... it just needs a bit of fine tuning.