Reviews - SolarLune

Okay, so Kromaia is a space-ish six degrees of freedom neon-visual shooter, and it's fun. Really fun. The graphics are great, the music awesome, and the feel of the game is really good. Your ship feels responsive, but has a lot of weight and drifting to it, making fast-moving fights really dangerous and exhillerating. I've only played a few minutes of it, but it's already grabbed me.

This is actually quite a good game. There's no music, but I really like the way the gameplay feels - nice and solid. I like the idea of a platforming combat oriented rogue-like, and it's looking like it's turning out really well so far!

You might be wondering why so many people gave this game a 10 / 10. I was surprised to find out that while this might just be a simple platformer, it's a GOOD simple platformer.

It doesn't do anything surprising in that you run around, jumping on platforms, and shooting Mudds (enemies) with a water gun - standard platformer fare. The background and foreground jumping mechanics work well, but don't switch up the gameplay. However, everything feels tight. The gameplay is solid, surprisingly so - never do you die because of the game. It's >always< your fault, which makes it fun to retry the same level. You always think, "Man, I know what I need to do to get past this." Also, the game actually gets significantly harder over the course of the levels, surprisingly - the platforming does get more precise, and the enemies are placed in more challenging positions in the levels.

As for the music, it's also great. I like World 3's music in particular. The graphics are nicely drawn and animated pixel art, as well. While the music and graphics aren't exceptional, they lend well to the overall theme and feel of the game.

As for improvements, it would have been nice to have more exploratory elements and set pieces, like Kirby's Adventure for the NES. In Mutant Mudds, you start a level on the same screen that the end goal is on, so there's not much of an exploratory feel (though there are still secrets to find), and the level just consists of platforms, hazards, and enemies. More puzzle elements would be nice, as well.

Overall, I give this game a 8 / 10!

Okay, here's my quick review after having played the full game for 30 minutes - 1 hour.

I feel like the game itself is interesting, and I do want to continue playing. However, Project Black Sun is difficult. I don't have a problem with a game being legitimately difficult, but Project Black Sun is difficult because of what I feel are some poor gameplay decisions. The inability to shoot upward, or even shoot in the air hampers gameplay to me.

This wouldn't be a problem under some circumstances, but since Project Black Sun is a Metroidvania with heavy platforming at its core, it's easy to get enemies attacking you that you can't dodge or attack because of their positioning.

When jumping, the camera does not pan to show where you're falling. This wouldn't be a problem, but early on in the game, there are some jumps that require you to know where you're going to land to not sustain damage - this becomes just guess-work when the camera only shows what's immediately under you.

It's just little things like that that kind of hurt the gameplay to me. I hope that it gets better with more time, and although it's a bit unlikely, that a patch could help build the game up a bit.

I like the graphics and art style, and the animations are very solid - the music's nice, as well. Overall, it's pretty good, but a bit too unnecessarily difficult.

Oh, and I like the game mechanics so far. I think actions could have less 'lag' on the players' part - it shouldn't take quite so long to shoot continually, for example.

Great game with good music and visuals. The teleport mechanic is inventive. The only problem is that it's not long enough - there could have been a few more puzzles to really exploit the teleportation mechanic. The game's great fun!

The BGE is actually quite good - the advantages of being easy to code in and having possibly the best workflow in a 3D game enine far outweigh the fact that it isn't extremely fast or powerful. The fact that it is free and open-source also makes up for any lacks in its capability.

2/14/11 EDIT: @AndrewIsGreen - The screenshots are fooling you. Check out the newest images uploaded.