Reviews

Review by Solver all reviews by Solver

This is quite an addicting game in a good way. I like the look and feel and all the names of the monsters. You can unlock new abilities and improve your skills. The skills seem to be random and can become unbalanced. I ended up with a very low speed and had to go far too meet some monsters worthy of my blades. However when reaching level 60-something things escalated and the game crached. Overall a nice game.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 2 Technical 3 Genre 3

Review by Tharro all reviews by Tharro

BladeBlade is game where you roam around in a jagged wire grid and encounter wire frame enemies (reminded me of the Carcassonne figures). The controls are quite simple (mouse & space bar) but it took me a while to find you I should hit the enemies with the blades because I was too heavily trying to avoid the projectiles :).

There is some jokes when you level up and the enemies are supposed to be named in a funny way. Tastes differ I guess (I've opted out myself, this requirement is just too subjective IMO).

The grid tiles are repeated tiles that are continuously morphing in slightly different shapes. This nicely implements the Escher requirement. The grid is also hexagonal (but it isn't very clear due to the morphed shaped) and additionally the upgrade window contains some hexagons as well (rotated in an Escheresk way).

The plugs aren't very obvious (wasn't reading the jokes, then read the README and started reading them again) but if you keep checking the message often enough you'll see one appearing when upgrading!

The bonus rule is omitted (but there is also a single unit test in the submitted code).

The game was fun to play. Unfortunately when longer in the game, around level 40 I'd say, the game depended a lot on the RNG and in theory you could go for a negative mana e.g. if you weren't careful (not sure if this would actually happen, didn't try so). Finally the game crashed as well around level 50 with an out of bounds error (and lots of Bad query/insertions in the log). Which reminded me that it instantly crashed on Linux as well (add with overflow error)... I always believed Rust was trying to prevent these kind of errors.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 3 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by Tijzz all reviews by Tijzz

When booting up the game, the opening screen and the music instantly catches your attention.

The controls of the game are clear and you are immediately thrown into the action. I think the art style is really cool and makes the game look really interesting.

The gameplay is somewhat one dimensional, since you can use the same tactics to kill all the enemies. Just circle around them and spam spacebar. This worked, because it was very difficult to die, especially after a few upgrades. If you just tried a little bit to dodge the bullets, you were never in danger. Next to that, your mana pool never ran out.
The upgrade menu looks really cool and allows for a lot of choices. However most of the time, the choice is easily made by just picking an option that does not have any negative effect. Not only is it very easy to pick an option, but it does not immediately feel like you have gotten an upgrade, since the enemies are also of a higher level. This makes it so that it feels as if the upgrades do not really have an impact.
Something that I also would change is that when you press spacebar, your character stand still for a short fraction. In my opinion, fluidity in movement is key in these kinds of games. You want to feel like a boss, killing enemies, becoming stronger and mastering the game. This short movement impairement just slightly kills the flow. I get that something should happen when you press space so that players do not just ram-spam the spacebar, but I don't think this movement impairement should be it.

On the rules, there were some funny quotes, but I think I missed a whole lot, because I was more focussed on the gameplay. The Escher rules has been implemented through the Tesselation and (seemingly) infinite space, which is cool. The hexagonal rule was implemented in the upgrade menu, basic, but okay. I personally missed the plug.

All in all, I think you can be very proud of what you created. It is a cool game and I think with just some minor expansions (such as different enemies and meaningful upgrades) you really have a cool little game.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None