Final scores, comments, and "the word"

[mreed2]

I ended up with a score of 204,493 -- there are still a few achievements that I haven't gotten, I have won all the battles, so I doubt the score is going to go up /that/ much. :)

The "word of doom" for me was: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/271713845549741673/AC60F3E9A06DAC4DB1AC7F53F12CED35AF58174F/

There are at least two words that can be used in this enounter, I think -- I'm 99 % certain that the word that I got the /first/ time I played this battle was different (but I didn't grab a screnshot, and obviously I don't remember the word).

I was very happy with this game overall -- some "What worked and what didn't:

What worked:
1) The story was quite good -- providing strong motivation to keep playing.
2) The typing mechanic worked well as well.

What didn't work so well:
1) The "you need two points to upgrade this skill" was obscure -- normally, in this sort of situation you have to spend two points to get one "pip", but in this game you can invest one point (gaining a pip, but no benefit) before you invest the second. I /eventually/ figured it out, but I was rather confused for a long time as to why I had a pip next to the "Press shift to run faster" skill but nothing seemed to happen when I did it.
2) The ice sections -- god, the ice sections. I don't object to the mechanic itself, but WASD doesn't work well when you need to move diagonally /immediately/, and because of the way the camera is oriented, more often than not you need to move NE / SE / SW / NW. I'd offer two options for this:
a) Have an option to display the keys help that you see during the introduction during the main game (as a toggle) -- the alternate keyset /does/ include dedicated keys for moving in the required directions, but after you've completed the introduction you can't actually /see/ the right keys.
b) Allow the use of the mouse (click on a location and you move towards that location) for movement -- yes, I know, you aren't supposed to use the mouse in this game -- but it allows the use of the mouse to select skills to upgrade, so... :)
3) The wind power is... Well, not that good. About half the time I used it, I ended up pushing enemies out of the viewable area, making them untargetable (and thus, wasting time on the combo meter). I'm not sure how, or even if, this should be fixed, but due to this effect I almost never used it (prefering the lightning power instead, which is perhaps /too/ good once you figure out how it works).

Other comments:

The two fixed battles in the torando area (where you get the wind power) were /very/ easy in comparison to the other battles on the critical path. I mean, /abusrdly/ easy -- my combo meter kept resetting because I was waiting for more enemies to appear. Are these battles supposed to be pushovers? Everywhere else the difficulty felt about right...

How exactly does the combo meter work, anyway? Most of the time I was too busy typing to observe it, but when I did, it behaved oddly: hitting an enemy would increase the combo /and/ add a little bit to the timer, but sometimes (especially when the multiplier was very high) it seemed like even hitting 5 or 6 enemies in, say, 5 seconds wasn't enough to get the combo timer to increase, or even stop going down so quickly. I suspect that if you make a mistake then you can't increase the timer for some amount of time -- if this is the case, you should probably make the meter turn red while you are in the "penalty box".

Given that you /do/ have multiplayer support (well, planned anyway)... You really should have an in-game leaderboard that allows you to compare your statistics (including score) against others -- perhaps filtering it to only people that have completed the same number of dungeons as you have. I'm really curious as to what kind of scores people are getting (thus, this thread... :)

[CoastalHaze]

Yeah I got that same word, and I laughed so hard when I saw it because I was actually obsessed with that word in high school, and I don't think I've seen it since then, which has been over 10 years (FeelsOldMan).

[Kitwsien]

Thank you for such detailled feedback, I'll try to answer everything.

About what "didn't work" for you, I've added those problems to our bug traker. We will try to improve that as much as possible once our priority comes to that.

About the battles that were too easy, you may have used the adaptive difficulty which lowered the difficulty for various reasons at that point of the game. You can also deactivate it and set the level of difficulty that suits you in the options.

About the combo meter, it fills up when you type a word depending on its number of letter (so that it is proportionnal to the time spent tiping it).

Finally, arena mode with online leaderboards is coming back very soon.

[mreed2]

Yes, I did have the adaptive difficutly turned on (with the difficulty set to the default level of "Medium") -- after I noted the trivial nature of the battles, I deliberately died in the first battle, then chagned the dififculty to "Hard" (still with adaptive difficulty turned on) and tried again -- if it was harder I couldn't tell.

The difficulty of all the battles before and after was OK (with adaptive difficulty on, and the difficulty level set to "Medium") -- these are the only two battles that I found excessively easy.

[Kitwsien]

With the adaptive difficulty turned on, the easy / medium / hard parameter does not change anything. We will hide the option when adaptive is on to make that clear.

[markoh00]

The Geman word of doom for me was: "Vermögenszuordnungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung". I laughed pretty hard and though that it was just a prank from the devs when I saw it. Had to type it letter by letter and got it at the last second.