SAGE 2022 - Demo STELLANOVA - SAGE '22 DEMO

This game is fantastic! The game is very nice visually and the soundtrack is really good too. Honestly, the only critique I have is that I wish it was longer.

Really like this! Sprite work is fantastic, love the huge vertical real estate, water effects are superb. The level up mechanic for your weapons are nice, but the charged shot needs balancing, feels too weak compared to the rapid fire shot.

This is honestly quite miserable to play. For starters, the ship's move speed is SO slow that you cannot catch up with powerups flying by, except of course when you use the dash. Which is much more likely to get you killed than be a viable option for movement due to how it works and the likelihood of running into something at the end of it's effect, since enemy placements are rather significant in this. The way this is implemented can very easily be an uncontrollable mess, and I spent more time in act 1 dying because of the dash or trying to chase the powerups that I can't reach in time than anything to do with enemies. All this could be more manageable if the next issue wasn't present. Leading into:

The ship momentum is absurdly high for how slow the ship is, making quick judgement calls almost impossible since the ship has to slip and slide with it's movement at any given moment. This is and always has been a cardinal sin in this genre, so I'm not sure how you thought this was a good idea. Any players or devs from this genre will tell you not to have momentum on player movement and keep it stochastic, so that the player never feels as though they can't back out of a situation as quickly as they notice it. It makes the first boss miserable until I realized I could sit above it at a 45 degree angle and pepper it until it dies.
I shouldn't have to abuse a loophole in it's pattern to feel like I can beat it, because otherwise this boss would be fairly simple if I could dodge without being on ice effectively.

The final issue is that I can't really tell what is happening in Act 2, because the colors are all particularly garish in this section and the contrast balance is very out of whack. fighting the Act 2 boss was a test of patience in a way that felt totally uncontrolled, with nothing really feeling quite right. I ended up just sitting in mostly one spot during the stage part of Act 2 because there was just no way I wanted to try and actually engage with whatever mess was going on in the lower area, because the contrast btween the water area and sky area threw me off so bad when I actually tried to go down there.

I was so put off by everything that I didn't even bother to try to get to Act 3. Which is a damned shame, as this is very pretty and I was really looking forward to a cute little Thunderforce-esque game.
All in all the graphics are a 10/10 but the gameplay loop is a solid 2.5/10. this needs alot of work if it's gonna go places. I really hope that you try to solve these, this game is a good basepoint that is very much kneecapping itself.

oh my the polish on this project is incredible... the visuals and the bosses were really fun! i can't wait to see more of it :)