SAGE 2022 - Demo Kirby Gamble Galaxy Stories v0.5 - Kirby Maker Update

I love, love, love the flow and presentation of this fan game—it's the best I've ever seen for a Kirby fan game—and Mystic Beam is a fun new take on classic Beam's moveset. There are some definite flaws to this demo, though. Green Greens should really be listed first in the menu instead of Asteroid Fields, for one, given how much easier it is than the later-mentioned level.

And for another... the level design in Asteroid Field sucks.

I don't know if it's supposed to be a late-game level or something, but it's super jarring to jump into. Mid-room checkpoints need to be a thing, given how large some of them can be and how much stuff you have weave through. You don't even get a checkpoint before fighting Wizzkid, and that's usually a given with these games. The falling asteroids can also be hard to predict—it feels like they just hit you whenever you're trying to move. I think a targeting reticle could help with that. Also, the horizontal autoscrolling segments need to have their speed drastically decreased. As it stands, the difficulty of the level feels on par with Heroes in Another Dimension—and I don't put that likely.

I literally got a Game Over twice on Asteroid Fields.

I never get Game Overs in Kirby games.

Still, what's here is extremely promising. It just needs a little more polish, and then it'll really start shining. Hope to see more from this fan game soon!

Great presentation. The graphics are nice and the music is pleasing. I like the HUD graphics. Green Greens was a decent level, pretty par for the course of a Kirby game, but I enjoyed it. It could have maybe used some larger background decorations, though. The environment felt a bit empty at times. Also, the music had an audio balance problem, where once section was much quieter than the rest. Whispy Woods was way too easy with a power. He absolutely melted and barely got an attack off. There's a reason bosses typically take reduced damage from powers in Kirby games.

Asteroid Field was also great from a presentation point, not so much from a design point. As difficult as it is, having large rooms with no checkpoints is a bit frustrating. It is also really long, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't also difficult and didn't have at least three auto-scrolling sections (I didn't actually beat it). Speaking of the auto-scrolling sections, the horizontal ones were a bit fast, but the vertical one was just tedious. It has a lot of time where you're just sitting around doing nothing but waiting for the screen to scroll up. The stage really could have used some health items, as well. I also wasn't a fan of Wizzkid having an instantly-screen-crossing laser beam that just comes out with little wind-up. The animation preceding it doesn't come across as a "I'm about to shoot a laser beam" animation. That move feels very unfair.

I also noticed a few small issues with the overall package. Cutter's melee attack wouldn't trigger no matter how close I got to an enemy. I also couldn't start charging an attack if a blade was already out, which is inconsistent with how it behaves in other Kirby games. Additionally, I hit play on the Gamble Maykr mode, which opened up a file select that I then could not close, because I did not have a level file to pick. Every time I hit cancel, it would just ask for a file again, and I had to open task manager and close the game through it. Finally, maybe I missed it, but I saw no in-game way to actually exit the game. I ended up using Alt-F4 after scouring the menus for a way to simply quit the game.

This is a great start to a Kirby game. It just needs some work on the smaller details. I'm really eager to play the full thing when it releases.