Miditidaga wrote: ↑Wed Jun 29, 2022 6:34 pm
I played through the entirety of the demo (I hope I didn't miss anything in my playthrough), and hope to post it on Youtube soon. I first heard about this project through Youtube, and I became interested in it. When I saw that the 1st demo for the game released, I knew that sooner or later I had to try it out for myself. I will share my feelings about this episode and will talk about it's Level design, replayability, and give my final score at the end of this post.
LEVEL DESIGN
This demo has some pretty well structured levels, with level design that is pretty great when you think about that factor alone. The visuals and graphics are also something I really liked about this episode. However, the enemy placement and level lengths, unfortunately, hold this episode back from being the best it can be.
This leads us to our first problem: Enemy spam. There are WAY too many enemies in a lot of levels, to the point that the difficulty in some levels become absolutely punishing. In most levels, it is very hard to keep track of so many enemies on the screen at once, and you don't have much time to react and dodge enemies, simply because there are so many that the space around the player becomes too tight. What makes the enemy spam even more punishing, is the level lengths.
Most of the levels' lengths are frustratingly long. I had bad experiences with levels that were too long. Usually, when I died in a very long level, I had to go ALL the way back to the beginning. During some of World 2's levels, knowing this made my time playing through the game extremely stressful, which should not be the case. This is made even worse due to enemy spam, making even the first few worlds (1,2,3, maybe A too) extremely difficult and painful to play through. I'd even say some levels are completely unfair towards the player.
However, the one thing I do really like about these levels, is the terrain design. This part of the level design is fairly great. The visuals and terrain placement is pretty great, when you aren't worrying about the overload of enemies and very long level lengths. I think the terrain placement and visuals is the best thing about this demo -- but that's just my opinion.
However, there are a lot of softlocks in 2-6 (Mushroom Sands).
Overall:
Enemy placement: Would DEFINITELY recommend changing.
Level lengths: Would recommend making some/most levels shorter.
Terrain/Visuals: Already pretty good!
REPLAYABILITY
Now, If I could, would I want to replay the levels in this game to find secrets, and have fun while doing so?
Well, not really. I tried my best to collect every secret in my playthrough, but it was painful and not much fun to do, due to the very long level lengths and over-exaggerated enemy placement. Getting all of the secrets took a long time, with me being overly stressed a lot, scared, and spending LOTS of time doing so. Most of that "lots of time" was not fun. However, I appreciate that secrets like star coins and secret exits aren't ridiculously hard to find. (Though, I would suggest making 1-1's secret exit more obvious, it is a bit too hard to find).
Overall:
Replayability: Not so great. 100%'ing the demo would be painful for most or even all players.
Secret placement: Nothing too wrong here!
FINAL SCORE
After writing this review, I can finally say that I rate this demo a...
5.5 out of 10 points.
I know that score isn't the best, but please don't take it the wrong way. I wouldn't have written this review if I didn't believe that this project had potential. In my eyes, this project is very creative, and with some fixing up, it could easily be an 8 or 9 points for me. I look forward to the future of this project, and I hope you take what I said into consideration.
Thank you so much for reading! -Miditidaga
