Demo feedback

[Bazyl]

Hello,
After 4 hr of gameplay i want to share my feedback on demo.

First kill of final boss was after ~1,5hr of gameplay. After that i killed it about 30 times. I maxed everything whatever was possible. Mostly im very positive about the game, I had a lot of fun playing it (which is rare to me tbh).
Pros:

- nice visuals/animations and sound design. Obviously UI is lacking, but it is seems it's placeholder
- great combat, very fun to just run around and kill enemies. Very skill based.
- at first I wanted to put to cons bad combat balance (I mostly used heavy attacks at first because everything else looked bad) but after forcing myself to try different builds I noticed they are equally good). There's small exception which ill write in cons, but overall combat/build balance is very nice.

Bad stuff:
- no tutorial, but I think it's demo problem. Basically I didn't know whats some stuff is about. I beat the game without noticing that you can unlock perks (second tab at statue) which are upgradeable by doing certain things. Also im not sure how I feel about statue perks lvls. It's not like it's bad but it's also not fun. You just spend next 5-10 minutes maxing its level by getting hit by enemies/attacking with certain style etc.
- balance of heavy 2h weapon. While combo attacks are OK-ish, heavy attack is not worth using. It's only attack in the game which you cannot use between enemy attacks (no enough time to fully charge heavy 2h attack even if you time it perfectly). So with heavy 2h attack you have to basically predict where enemy will be in next ~7 seconds, and if you finally do it you are rewarded with... mediocore dmg. It's like slow heavy monster hunter attack, it should almost one shot enemy. IMO in it's current state this attack (and weapon too) is much worse than 2 others. It's much harder to use, but there's no reward for this difficulty increase.
- BIGGEST PROBLEM IMO: awful "power" progression. You get CRAZY amount of dmg from passives like weapon upgrades and statue perks, which is awful. Boons you choose during run are incredibly low-value. What made Hades fun is that perks made your gameplay unique and different each run, which is completely opposite in this game. In my later runs I just picked whatever boon, because in the end it didnt really matter. Statue perks and weapon upgrades are boring, and they should be minimal (like 5% dmg per perk MAX, not 50% like now). Boons you get during run are boring, they never change how run feels. In Hades you felt every boon because they were meaningful, and here you get electified/aftershock/bleed and it doesnt matter, thats just passive bonus dmg. Make them more interesting and more fun like electric bold bouncing between enemies, heavy pushback of enemies, huge ground dot dmg etc. When i pick bleed boon, I want to feel like I picked bleed and my gameplay is now based on bleeding, and not just normal run but this time bonus dmg comes with blood animation. Becase of this every run fells the same.
- oh and because of crazy %dmg you get from passive bonuses like statue perks and weapon upgrades, game is becoming very easy which takes a bit from fun combat. You just hit enemies with whatever and stagger them easly. While I understand it should be easier after X run, you should still care what enemies are doing and not just mash buttons because you now have 3x hp and 2x dmg compared to before. And again, thats just passives, boons dont matter...

Small annoying things:
- after killing enemies, if there are multiple paths open, you have to run around and check what are the rewards per path. You should be able to see it immadietly after killing enemies so either camera should zoom out a little after combat or you could add some UI element which shows rewards per path (like circle with arrow if door is out of field of view)
- couldnt see how much money I have in shop, then I realised it's in brackets next to price. Very unintuitive, it should be big number in clearly visible place.

While this feedback may seem bad, I want to say I really liked the game. Multiple times I launched it just to do some runs because I had so much fun with combat system and weapons.

[Doryah Games]

Hello, thanks for the feedbacks !

- UI : We have a whole rework on those, no worries

- Tutorial : We plan to keep the "simple way" of indicators on top right of the screen for most of them, but we plan to add more "step by step" tutorials for interfaces as they are not clear enough right now.

- Heavy weapon balance : I'll give the feedback to the team.

- Balance power progression : This point is very interesting, I will give it to the team as it is rather complex and deep to just let myself answer on that !

- Easy game after progression : As for now, it was a wish to do so because it is only a demo. The game overall should feel different from that !

- End of combat : We have a plan for that !

- Resources : Will give the feedback to the team


Sorry if most of my answers are "giving to the team" but we have to study everything and check what is doable in the time that we have :)

Thanks again for the feedback, and have a nice day !