Manic Archers Reviews

I'm not sure how to best enjoy this game. Went looking for a forum, Discord, even a Reddit group, and couldn't find anywhere to chat to others about this game. So I decided to shout into the void about this game, in the form of a review. For context: This style of game is not new to me. I'm a big fan of "party" style local multiplayer games, and I have a lot of fun introducing new friends to Duck Game, Towerfall Ascension, etc. etc. Just played this over xmas with some family and ... I think we had fun? It was certainly chaotic. Much of the first rounds was just trying to work out what the heck just happened and who "won" and why. Right off the bat - the screen is chock full of stuff as soon as people start attacking. It can be very hard to see who's shooting at who and what to dodge. And then within seconds, the powerups "happen" and you have no chance of making sense of anything. The entire screen fills with flashing effects like laser blasts, particles, lightning strikes, and before you know it, 1 or more people are dead and the round is over. We played a decent number of rounds (I would say somewhere between 10 and 20?) trying to work out the game and give it it's best shot. We were laughing and making alarmed noises, probably not for the right reasons - mostly just reacting to the sheer chaos and confusion and sudden end to each round. In the end, the best tactic we came up with was trying to work out where the nearest person was, and charge towards them mashing the fire button hoping for the best. Actually we stopped trying to play and switched to another game, because we just couldn't make sense of it. Possibly this is a game which requires a decent amount of skill to start enjoying, and the barrier of entry is kind of high. Certainly, for the reasons I described, it's not very clear what's going on or how to play the game effectively by jumping into it and trying to play. And yet I can't find any guides or anything online. Started out this review with the "YES" option selected, then switched it to a "NO" when I got to the part where I realised we gave up on the game and switched to something that actually made sense. Until then, we were almost having fun. It's certainly frantic, and there's a lot to do. To the developers; please tone down the size of the effects, and I get you want to keep it "manic" but slow down the speed of the projectiles, the size of the powerup abilities, etc. etc. just enough to make it clearer what's going on and introduce a degree of skill into the randomness. I get the impression the devs have something good on their hands, but tweaked everything up to 11 as they got better and better at their own game. This needs more public testing!