Loki's Revenge

So I've gotten into a bit of a habit recently of doing quite lengthy reviews and feedback on Itch games. So I thought I'd do that here too!

(For reference I played the Windows downloadable 0.3 Alpha Version.)

An absolutely gorgeous vampire-survivor-like that takes the formula and makes it it's own.

Okay let's start by diving into the things I didn't like or thought didn't work well.

Initially when you load the game the music and SFX are waaaay too loud had to immediately go into the settings and turn them down.

There exists and it is possible to get on the same level up the same stat boosting item. I was offered I believe boots that gave 15% speed and a mushroom that gave 20% speed. Obviously I'd take the mushroom but I don't understand why there is more than 1 item that does the same thing and takes up valuable room for other offered items.

The poop was awesome but out of maybe 8~ runs it only showed up for me once and there's no visual indicator of it's range which I would like to see.

I really don't like how much the screen shakes an option to turn it down/off would be useful especially if the game adds an accessibility option screen on initial launch. In a similar fashion although it's nice to know how much damage I'm doing I don't see the point of the damage indicators, they clutter the screen massively when there are hundreds of enemies around and it already begins to become hard to see what's going on.

I REALLY don't like that you slow down when you attack. I don't know if that's just a design choice you have central to your game but it feels against the flow of the game to me which is to be a quick run and gun type game.

Also in a similar fashion I also don't like that I need to "reload" my hammers. I would prefer a constant stream even if it was slower in average than having a pause to reload.

The player hitbox is massive and feels unfair. Enemies are able to hit the top of your head/your shadow and it feels like rather than the hitbox being where the player would actually be standing it's actually the whole sprite.

Finally there's literally no point in fighting at all. You can literally dodge the enemies for the entire 5 minutes with no penalty at all (here's a screenshot of it)

Also the leaderboard bugged apparently and showed my previous run stats but you can see the 5:00 timer on the right showing I lasted that long with the level bar being empty and showing level 1. I can assure you I killed no enemies at all on this run.

I know it probably seems like I'm being quite brutal but with you planning on releasing this on steam it's good that you be made aware of these things earlier rather than later. My points could be completely wrong, something you've already addressed or your intended design that I as a person just don't personally like.

So now that I've gotten all of that out of the way let me say that I loved this game. As I mentioned at the opening the game is beautiful. As a pixel artist myself I can really appreciate good pixel art and Loki's Revenge is oozing with it. The character sprite and the monsters all look absolutely fantastic, they clearly communicate their design and there's no noisy "filling the gaps" it's all just clean design. That same level of quality extends to the environment, while not that important in a game like this the game still has a nice variety of objects and art to stop the screen looking too "samey". I also liked the little set pieces I found and had a silent chuckle at the particular rock formation.

The music and SFX were awesome, I especially liked the rising scale/tone when throwing your weapon as you threw more/got closer to reloading. I also liked the pitch of it rising as your weapon throw speed increased. Really nice touch that added a little more character to the sound.

Obviously being a demo/early alpha there's only 1 level and character and no upgrades but I can see you plan to add a ton more and I'm really looking forward to it. I hope you add a bunch more weapons because it felt like the game was really lacking in different ways to actually fight the enemies. Or maybe you intend to just have each character have their core weapon and focus entirely on those. Regardless I want more!

Overall I had a ton of fun. I'm a massive Vampire Survivors fan and have been playing that game since it's early versions so this 100% tickles my interest in that genre of game and I'm super looking forward to the development of this and future updates.

If you have any questions or concerns about my review feel free to get in touch and I'd be happy to chat about it.

how long did it take to make?