[GAME][FINISHED] Neo Magiko

[Alpha Six]

Copy-and-paste from PxC, just in case you didn't see it (probably nobody else did).

Alright, so I've played this.

It's a fun little game, but the design ends up flawed and overly difficult in the end. I see the idea of only being able to move with your weapons, but the execution here makes it way too difficult to control your character-- leaving you to basically propel yourself in one direction forever and hope you can hit an asteroid.
It's easy to move your character, but it's difficult to actually control them, and, more importantly, stop them from moving. Moving becomes even more difficult because the player flips in a total 180 because of the mouse aiming-- forcing the player to realize that if they try to fire the direction they originally were, they're just going to get flipped over and propel themselves farther.
The game obviously has a learning curve, which I respect-- the best games usually have learning curves. The problem here is that the learning curve is brutal, and it seems like the entire fun factor of the game comes from beating that learning curve, rather than actually learning the game.

The graphics are eye-catching, but there are a lot of areas in the menus and such that give off an amateur/poor look, mostly due to the fact that there are visible scribbles and rough edges in many menu elements-- making the game have a little bit of a lazy-ish look. Transitioning from, say, the main menu, to the options menu, looks really nice though.



The gameplay seriously needs to be fixed, though. At the moment, this game feels like an interesting try, but consistent play just feels frustratingly difficult. You want to make a game that is fun and interesting, but you also want the game to be easy to pick up and play-- otherwise, a lot of people aren't going to play it past the first time.

As a game developer, you want to aim for the largest "community" you can establish with your project; Make the type of game that you want, but if you're going to release it publicly, you also want to make it accessible to as many people as possible.