Before anyone reads this, i like this game a lot and was delighted to see this kind of gameplay in the presentation this year, my criticism comes form a place of support, not disdain:
This Game´s Art, Presentation and Music is absolutely lovingly crafted, it plays and feels well, and the Story begins with an interesting hook, i really like what i have played. I gotta say however, that when it comes to the gameplay, that love doesn't come as much from the Devs part as i would have felt comfortable with.
To explain, this game burrows it's gameplay almost beat by beat (no pun intended) from NIS Americas Mad Rat Dead, from the character movement, over the skillset down to how the difficulty levels work, and the things it copies, it copies very well, coming with muscle Memory from this game, i was able to S Rank all 4 Levels present in a heartbeat. it's in the lack of original ideas compared to it and in the things it misunderstands about the concept where it falters a LOT in comparison:
In MDR, The entire world stood dictated, not directly by the BPM of the Song, but by the Tickrate of your Actions, this happens to mean the same thing on Normal difficulty, since the beatmaps for it (just like in MDR) are just allowing you to act on each beat,
On Hard difficulty, however, your movement is dictated by a song-dependant beatmap, while the enemies and world around you (so far only the enemies and ONE mechanic involving switches), are still following the regular BPM, this presents a problem with run optimization, object sync, and fair rating of the taken time. MDR happened to have measured the time you took in a level directly by the ticks you had chances to act in, and thus gave an OBJECTIVE measure of how quick you where.
In Vocaless, this factor has some margin for luck, depending on how well your movement abilities aligned with a Levels Objects when encountering them. This isn't a gamebreaking or huge issue right now, in fact its hardly noticable, but it will become one once levels and mechanics become more complex, down the dev road.
Speaking of, my second and last big point of criticism in comparison, the level layout.
In MDR, each singular piece of the level EXACTLY followed a grid based on your two Dashes, Dashtypes, jump height, bounce height, and extended jump height, and the titular character, the Rat, DIDN'T deviate from that movement pattern,
the challenge of this type of game then comes from reading and combining these moves correctly while keeping rhythm.
As long as you kept a chain of button actions throughout the entire level, you can always beat it in the exact same manner, without needing to be pixel or frame perfect, the only exception that seems unintional, was quickfall during higher falls, which occasionally ended offbeat,
the other two grid-independent actions were regular walking, which only set in when performing no actions, and an ability to cancel your movement mid dash, both of which where strictly used for minor course correction when you messed up. These two even got, unconscious to the player, corrected when wallbouncingor quicklanding form a jump over a wall.
Vocaless tries to replicate this, and succeeds for the most part, and it feels like the Devs are aware of it not being perfect, hence the implementation of your dash automatically roll-aligning you to any edge/surface you dash into.
However, a lot of platforms, walls and elements seem either entirely offgrid, or the character has too much freedom to move outside of it, its honestly hard to tell. But the point of being entirely offsync with movement from the actual layout of the stages comes in early and repeats a lot.
As to what I would love to say in coming updates to adress this, there is a number of options, like i said, the movement this game copies, feels great, so does the extended dashing, to point out the most obvious difference, and the Devs clearly are creative enough to make room for additional, different gameplay to MDR.
MAYBE implement the worldsync to the beatmap on a global scale and the rating system one to one to MDR, since those two seem to be a bit unavoidable with this concept,
while striving for more differences and uniqueness with the movesets and mechanics going forward. I just sang the praises of the grid in relation to the movement, and it definitely has some importance, but with more options for more nuanced movement and fun ways to choose how to move, this could probably still be left out entirely, while not overwhelming the player too much. The result in options when designing levels would make this stand out a LOT better and give it an edge more of it's own identity.
This may sound like i was offended by how similar this game felt to the other one, or like those have been big detractors for me, but that's absolutely not the case, the Music, setting and different vibe certainly really work on their own merit and i liked what i played a lot, as mentioned, and if there is a place for derivative games, it's certainly SAGE. I can't wait to see where this game goes in the future. If whoever reads this didn't play either of these games yet, go for it, the concept is one of the easy to learn hard to master goodens, maybe you can take what i wrote as pointers how to play these. If you are the devs and took it to heart, huge kudos and thanks for your time :)
