NOMAD (demo)

The game is good in terms of graphics, gameplay, and music, but the menu design could be changed

some general scatterbrained thoughts and bugs i noticed throughout the demo: 

-bug: changing the post-processing setting also sets your motion blur and bloom for some reason

-i feel that the game definitely tries to teach you too many mechanics way too fast. you need time to get used to one or two mechanics at a time through combat encounters, otherwise it just feels completely overwhelming. start the player off without having their abilities available, give them a basic arena where they can get a handle on the shooting, then teach them the movement mechanics one at a time and give them a combat encounter where they can play with those, and then get to each of the individual abilities. you can also save some of the more advanced tech like sliding into a wall to bounce off it for a bit later.

-i at first found the sword execution mechanic kind of confusing, i didn't know what to be looking for to indicate an enemy was ready to be executed because there's already so many effects and stuff that i didn't know which was supposed to be the execution indicator. 

-bug: if you change your mouse sensitivity from the full settings menu and then go back to the pause menu, the "quick settings" UI doesn't show the updated sensitivity.

-bug: in the arena after you unlock the rune gate, i killed all the enemies but the forcefield didn't go down and i was softlocked. luckily, slaying all enemies with the debug menu fixed it. this bug also happened in every single combat arena after that point - the third time was really weird though, i tried using the debug menu to kill all enemies and at first nothing really happened and the forcefield was still there, but then i tried to kill myself with the explosive crystals to respawn and after shooting one and getting hit by it the forcefield just instantly opened??? this was consistent on my second playthrough of the level as well.

-at first i kind of thought the triple jump mechanic was weird, but it's actually pretty neat. i like that you get to choose between horizontal movement with the dash and vertical movement with the jump. i feel like you might also be able to expand on it further by letting the player hold space to hover after a triple jump or something. also also there should be some kind of obvious indicator that you've used your triple jump, otherwise you have no indication that you've just spend all of your energy.

-i think grapple shouldn't be its own keybind, since it's only used under specific contextual situations anyways. it feels awkward to have to scramble for the F key when you see the prompt pop up after having barely been using it, especially when there's so many other ability keybinds to keep track of. i feel it would be much more intuitive to have the dash button also double as grapple if you're looking at a grappleable object - after all, they both serve pretty similar purposes. i doubt there will ever be a point where you're intending to dash and then accidentally grapple instead and that ends up somehow being a bad thing.

-the boss fight seemed kinda cool, although i killed it way too fast to really get to enjoy it. i think you may want to give it some resistance to power weapons. also i was able to move it around by shooting it with the rocket launcher which i'm pretty sure is a bug.

-bug: sensitivity resets whenever you restart a level

-the movement mechanics feel pretty janky. the slide doesn't seem very useful and the wallrun detection isn't all that reliable.

-having the sword pup up and block bullets when you IFrame dash through them is REALLY REALLY COOL and super satisfying :)

-i kind of forgot that aiming is a thing you could do and only remembered on my second playthrough of the level

-the abilities are cool, especially the knockback bubble. knocking enemies into the air and then shooting or executing them feels very satisfying, as does using it to explode the explosive crystals. i also find it fun to use the wall as a slingshot with the grapple by cancelling the grapple before you actually reach it.

-i never got anywhere close to running out of ammo on anything other than the rocket launcher ever. even when i try to intentionally just use the shotgun and avoid switching weapons entirely, i can't even get below half ammo. it is a bit faster to run out on the pistol and auto rifle, admittedly, but you can still clear the majority of an arena just using either of those, even on hard mode. i feel like you should either get rid of the mechanic where you get free shots over time (having limited ammo already serves to encourage weapon swapping anyways, having the recharging ammo is just unnecessary), or just get rid of ammo entirely on everything other than power weapons, honestly. right now it's just kind of a non-factor that only serves to clutter the screen and divert the player's attention.

-bug: i'm pretty sure you can entirely skip the last arena fight before the boss if you stick to the right side of the area (i went back when i realized i was skipping it though).

-the grapple prompt for executing an enemy gets overridden by the grapple prompt for grappling to your placeable wall, which is really frustrating.

-i'm not sure how i feel about having energy recharge much slower while airborne. i get that you want to encourage players to use their air mobility sparingly and keep the combat more grounded, but i feel like there might be a be a better way to go about it. maybe make it so the regen gets progressively slower the more movement abilities you use until you touch the ground? also it might be a good idea to include a hint about this mechanic because i didn't figure out how it worked until much later and was kind of confused and frustrated by my energy constantly being low.

-bug: it seems like the blast power sometimes just randomly activates even when i don't press Q

-overall, the demo level was pretty enjoyable. the core combat mechanics are satisfying which i feel is the game's strength. it's also visually very interesting and pretty looking, even though my laptop has trouble running it on high settings.