Astronium Reviews

For $3, it's good. It helped fill the "What do I play?" void for a few hours. I look forward to seeing this dev in the future.

Overall a great game considering its price. The art style is simple yet amazing and ties in well with the theme of the game. The combat at the beginning is a bit slow and tedious, but once you get more familiar with it and get better weapons the game reaches the perfect balance of challenging and fun. Great work by the devs! The cheeky rotmg/star wars references were also interesting.

A great, short game for a good price. I liked the combat system, which is really fun if you stay close to the enemies and play aggressively. The weapon varety is also good: some are faster and some have more range than otheres, so you can find one for your favourite playstyle. The artsyle is also pretty good if you like pixelart. The one thing I would add would be signs (or something similar) that would tell tell the player the difficulty of each zone, since after defeating the first boss player can go to every single area and find themselves unable to deal with the enemies. Overall, great job by the dev!

It was OK!! Nice little combat-based exploration game. I wish traveling the map was a little faster or the maps were a little smaller, and I wish there were more cool weapons and areas or ways to customize the weapons more rather than relying on small % chances for drops, but finding a new or good weapon was still fun. The bosses were a solid challenge but very simple and required patience more than skill a lot of the time. Overall I would say I had a good experience with the game, keep up the good work :)

It's a pretty fun, short game to play for a bit, but there are a few things i think could make it better: slight spoilers - Weapon Storage System I think this could make the game a bit better for a few reasons. When i was playing, I got the scythe weapon that drops in the ice zone, and upgraded it a bit. I used this weapon for a while, then I swapped it out for the blue halberd you get in the beach zone, which felt like a downgrade, but since i swapped it, the scythe was lost. I then had to farm for probably 30-60 minutes on and off to get it back again. Considering one of the main parts of the game is your weapons, it feels like you have to make sacrifices if you want to try new weapons, as if you get a new one, you gotta upgrade it to the same level as the last to see how it compares, and if the old weapon was better, or you liked it more, you gotta farm for it again. It wouldn't have to be complex, but maybe just a few storage slots could help, alternatively, maybe each weapon could be permanently unlocked and equipped from the fire? - Boss confusion During my time playing, I went straight from the forest boss (first area), to the beach boss (final area). This happened because I didn't even know there was a boss in the two middle zones, which could have been my fault, but this being something that could happen might be a problem. If anything, I think it could help if you are given a hint that notifies that the boss gate is unlocked, as it seems there is not much indication as to what a key will unlock, other than the name and locked gates in the general area. Edit: The bug below is planned to be fixed. ̶A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶ ̶(̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶I̶ ̶s̶u̶b̶m̶i̶t̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶o̶r̶t̶,̶ ̶a̶s̶s̶u̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶)̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶f̶i̶n̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶a̶p̶s̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶b̶o̶s̶s̶,̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶b̶e̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶1̶s̶t̶,̶ ̶2̶n̶d̶,̶ ̶3̶r̶d̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶4̶t̶h̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶1̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶4̶t̶h̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶r̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶r̶a̶b̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶a̶p̶.̶ ̶M̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶u̶g̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶m̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶.̶ Well anyways, might be some things to consider for possible future updates.

Very good game for what it cost. Love the pixel graphics. This game is a good foundation if the developer wants to expand more on it in the future

Have you heard of the term mini Metroidvania? What about mini (top down) souls-like? That is how I would describe this game. I am not 100% sure if it is the 1st one, but It is the first one I can think of. Some of the weapons seemed to hit the enemies way more ofton than others, or maybe it was just me. Other than that, I really liked this game, and the unique attack structure (each face button attacks in a different direction). I also wish there was a run function or roll function. I wished for one or the other when running back and forth between biomes, but I am guessing the Devs worry that would make defeating the enemies too easy? Definitely worth $2!

I personally dislike the combat as it just seems slow and annoying, like I'd get slow uncancellable attacks in something like dark sousl, but in a agame like this it's just really annoying. idk if I missed something, but the difficulty curve between the nature zone and the beach zone is INSANE. it just instantly makes you fight enemies that are really strong and finally have unique attacks and stuff. idk. maybe it's just not for me, rip, hoped i'd like it. However, the artstyle is quite neat imo and you can tell the developer put effort into this game, I'll make this a positive review cuz it's the 2nd review ever lol

Completed the entire game and perfected it. I'll note that I am NOT considering the game's price in this review. If you just want my answer of "is this game worth $3?" Then my answer is "I wouldve paid up to $10 without being unsatisfied with what I got." Its a mixed bundle for me. I'll start with the positives: * Combat is simple and intuitive and adds to the game experience. In fact, combat is sort of the entire game experience. * The art style is cute. * The music is a real banger * A single playthrough does not take very long, can easily be done in 2-3 hours by someone who isn't even that great at the combat However, there are definitely a lot of downsides for me, most of them rather minor but some I find more egregious. + Combat is easy and can be cheesed in almost all points in the game. If you are struggling in combat, here is how to beat your enemy (with the sole exception of some gunwielders and the frost spear-holders): walk up to them and then walk behind them. Attack. Walk back in front of them. Attack again. All three bosses fall trivially in face of the method of simply standing behind them. There are only 3 or 4 enemies in the game which seem to have the ability to frequently hit behind them and prevent this from working damagelessly. ++ Once I realized this trick, it made me immediately stop engaging with combat. I no longer felt the need to try and working around the patterns of an enemy because learning their patterns and adapting to them was only handicapping myself. Even in a stick only run, I don't think I would be planning on actually engaging with combat in the way I assumed was intended. + PWP? Plot? What plot? I expected the NPCs we were presented with after the tutorial to do something, literally anything for us. Instead two of them really do nothing and the other one (Voryx) only exists as a token turn in for our electronics. Yes he fixes our ship for us, but the initial dialogue about how he makes weapons REALLY made me expect that he would upgrade my weapons somehow. It was a shame moving on from a weapon I really liked (the venom scimitar) and I wish I could have kept it longer while upgrading it in some form. + Large map with no navigation support. After I beat a zone, I roughly know where I'm going, but there is absolutely no direction as to where you are supposed to go within a zone, even while knowing what your objective is. I struggled for probably 30 minutes in the forest zone while I had to wait for a friend to catch up and tell me the solution he found looking for the key to the boss room. It was behind a door that told me it couldn't be moved when I pressed interact with it. Naturally, I did not try to then knock it down by pressing forward, because I had been told already that it wouldn't budge. ++ This applies equally as much in the other two zones. We have no idea where to go. We just sort of wander around and hope it is the right away. Even without adding in quest objectives, adding in a minimap that we could summon at will would greatly aide in exploration - both so we can figure out if we missed a room somewhere and so we can navigate our way back. ++ The beautiful scenery and art style also works as a detriment here. Aside from shape, each room nearly looks the exact same within a region. + Checkpoint placement: For the most part, check points honestly just felt random. It felt like they were just plopped down so that each section would have some, without proper consideration of when they were actually necessary. I would say that less is more, and I appreciate how they can be a couple rooms apart from each other. But I think that having a checkpoint near each of the bosses would be a much greater help. Instead of a respawn timer, theres a different sort of artificial punishing wait on each death to a boss because they are usually about a 10 to 20 second walk away from the nearest check point to them. I think I wound up walking a full minute on the first boss, because I didn't realize there was a closer check point to it (see map is too large and hard to navigate). + Relative lack of replayability. Theres a lot of ways to make the game harder on yourself, and I plan to play it more - probably at least another 2 or 3 runs. I want to try a stick only run, a few attempts at a sort of speed run, and minimal checkpoint run (probably 1 checkpoint per region is what I'll do). But aside from the self-imposed challenges, the above points and ESPECIALLY the lack of any deeper plot or interactions with the NPCs make the game feel lacking in terms of returning to it.