Feedback

[foxhound438]

I have some complaints after trying out a handful of runs. I do like the feel of the game overall, I enjoy the aesthetic of hyper light a lot, the character designs are great so far, all the melee weapons I've tried are satisfying, but on to those complaints:

-On-boarding feels bad for a couple of reasons. If this was a game that I was only marginally interested in because of someone else recommending it to me, I would probably have refunded the game after a few tries because of the experience in the early game.
- Having no access to healing outside of picking up 5hp from uncommon drops or running around bored trying to find random flowers on the field that also give only 5hp makes getting hit really over punishing when you don't know any of the attack patterns or are getting used to the controls. You should start with 1 med pack, or at least capacity for one, so you can at least learn a little rather than spending 80% of your time in loading screens or running away from everything.
- I get that this is supposed to be a rogue-lite game and most rogue-lites have tough learning curves by design, including limited health as a mechanic, but locking the ability to have access to decent healing to a mechanic that exists outside of the actual run feels awful, especially when you have to go into the same world 4 times and die before having a chance at getting access to the currency that unlocks the ability to carry medkits.
- Other rogue-lite games put health in shops to help extend survival after taking some damage. Here, if you find a shop that sells medkits within the first 4 attempts at exploring, you aren't even allowed to buy them to heal because you don't have capacity, which as far as I can tell there's no way to upgrade that without ending a full cycle (and if you don't grind enough... battle pass points? by the end of the cycle, you still can't upgrade to have access to medkits for another 4 attempts). Which feels bad, because the thing I need to continue is right there, I have the money for it, but I'm not allowed to have it for no good reason.
- depending on spawn, the enemies you first encounter can be too much for a totally unequipped, inexperienced player and kill you almost immediately. There should be a buffer zone around the initial spawn that has less dense packs of enemies and avoid throwing more difficult things at you right away (ie, the big guy that spams rifle shots and shotgun attacks, throws grenades that explode way too quickly, has infinite poise, and so much health that attacking it with the starting sword feels like trying to chop down a tree with a plastic spoon), maybe just until you've unlocked some permanent upgrades in the hub world to be able to deal with that kind of stuff out the gate.

-I hit several spots where the ground was like ankle height uneven and prevented me from moving, which really really feels bad. Really bad. Like can kill your run and you have no idea what happened bad. The same situation in other games has made me drop games altogether, because it feels really, really, really bad when you can't step over a piece of broken map geometry that you can't even see when playing the game.

-Camera inversion not being tied to aim inversion (and having no option for the latter at all in the game as far as I can find) sucks and makes guns unusable.

-locking onto enemies doesn't make skills point in that direction, which is unintuitive and feels bad

-I tried to remap buttons for playing on controller but it doesn't let you change a bunch of them. There's really no reason for that.

-Please just get rid of fall damage, there's no reason for it to be in the game.

[ThatGuyKhi]

Agree with all points. The foundation is there but man oh man is some QOL needed.

More feedback:
A training area in the hub. The combat introduction is just some text and then we're thrown into the game world not knowing a thing. Give us a chance to get a feel for the game itself.

Melee mobs dont have good/consistent attack indicators. There was a fire lizard elite that instantly went from standing up straight, to a crouched position throwing fireballs. Mobs hit too hard for that lack of windup. Ranged units feel more fair.

Enemy indicators could be more precise. A tiny arrow on their red blob to show that if they're above or below our position would help alot in those non flat areas.

[AlmightySkrew]

Nice feedback all around. Here's my 2 cents:

-Healing/health is a huge issue at the moment. It seems like the intended direction was to encourage the player to parry enemy attacks to regain red health while finding little healing plants to slow the constant chipping away of life. I gotta say, that absolutely needs to change. Tying parries to healing is an awful idea. Don't do it. Tie it to the finisher system if you must, but never parries. Making people increase the risk of taking more damage to recover health is a bad idea. At best it encourages people sit around and wait for easy parries just to minimize the chipping away of health - that's still a negative for combat flow/design. The healing plants restore +5 health, which is a fraction of a single hit from most enemies. That's too low. I know there are pickups that can provide alternate healing methods, but the standard is just too bad to rely on the RNG of good pickups for reasonable healing.

-After playing some random pubs, I think the game might just not have good enemy number scaling between single and multiplayer. The multiplayer pubs felt WAY better balanced and manageable. The singleplayer sessions just felt like getting mobbed in every fight. There are even adds in bossfights, which is GOOD for multiplayer, but TERRIBLE for singleplayer. I think a lot of issues could be solved by reducing the numbers of enemies per encounter in singleplayer. There is simply too much animation commitment to justify fighting hordes of enemies by oneself in this game.

-Lock-on seems to have difficulties with vertical tracking and camera view. This doesn't matter much for free aiming with guns, but there are a few abilities/attacks (charge spear throw for example) where it's necessary. Lock-on in general needs some work, but I don't think there's a single game where it's perfect... so good luck to the devs!

I think there's actually a solid foundation here. The real question is if they can tweak things quickly enough. This release might be bad enough that they won't recover, but I hope they keep trying. Don't give up skeleton!