Weather Dominance Reviews

Okay, I met the developer over discord and I am a developer myself. With that out there, I am not extremely familiar with this project, I did get a chance to play the demo and later purchased this to see what was up. It is my understanding that this is the developers first complete project and that this was created using Game Maker. My experience is in Unity and GODOT so in this critique I cannot speak to GameMaker but I will speak on fundamental design. 1. State Machine in specific a Finite one would have made much of the controls better, controls are the first impression and it was a bad one, you had various controls that are active at the same time. Generally I make a habit of locking controls within a FSM to ensure I keep the growing number of them under well... control no pun intended. 1a. Forced options, when the game starts it detects my controller, this would be fine if it could detect which input I was actually using later or if it didn't actively use the controller and gave me the option to upon detection. 2. Music, a completed project in my humble opinion needs to have a ST or OST you really shouldn't have pushed this out without one. I fiddled with settings a bit and found sound by default is off but that's just the SFX not any music. Without that you've given yourself a higher hurdle in pulling your player into the mood you are setting. 3. A game like this is impressive to me, in that you attempted to give everything functionality and to the point where you have evolving logic from sequences of interactions. That tells me there was a strong vision for the game before design which is great. 4. UI is very smooth, while the visuals are very likely engine default that's just a rub, you can easily replace those place holders, however it probably should have been done in Early Access not on full release. Conclusion. Okay this game has some very Nintendo-isc vibes but in what it is going for. It however can't get out of its own way in getting there. This could be largely fixed with the implementation of a proper state-machine and some music. You've got the idea though with your tutorial, and to be honest tutorials are by far the most difficult thing to design, you go too far people hate it you go too light people hate it but what exactly is too far or too light? The reality is there isn't one, you just need to make the first thing you teach be the skip button.

I bought this game after meeting the developer over Discord, and decided to leave a review with some feedback. Overall, this is a pretty good attempt for a first project and I think there's an interesting gameplay concept here. But I think the execution could have been better. 1.) The Weapon Wheel - This is probably the game's biggest issue. You have a wide variety of abilities to choose from, but it's cumbersome to switch between them. Using the TAB key instead of the mouse wheel is a bizarre choice to me, as many modern PC games have shown the benefits of using the mouse wheel for the weapon/inventory wheel. Being able to use the middle mouse button to bring up the ability wheel and scroll to switch between abilities would make the gameplay a lot more fast and seamless. Not that this game is fast paced by any means, but it would've made the game feel less slow. This mechanic is even worse on controller as you have to select an ability with the D-pad before using it. You also have to hit the "confirm" button to equip an ability instead of simply highlighting it, which adds to the cumbersome feeling of the wheel. Switching abilities is a core mechanic in this game, and it should be treated as such. 2.) Design Oversights - This game is impressive for the amount of things you can do. However it doesn't seem to properly utilize half of your abilities. I never saw a reason to use the dashing or snow abilities. Especially since I'm not even sure what the snow ability is used for. No enemies required snow to defeat them, and there was never a reason to freeze anything. Storm is also pretty under utilized because it takes half of your O2, and there's no consistent way to replenish it. And if you run out of O2, you die. So this makes the risk-reward of using Storm not very worth while. Picking up NPCs actively breaks some quests, as you can just move to the other side of the screen and teleport to the other side where the house/cave is. This completely negates any challenge this level might've had. This should be fixed in a future update. Occasionally you'll enter areas that are already "cleared," and most of them serve no purpose other than to let you skip to the next area. These areas should've been used as a way to regain some O2, as there's no other way to consistently collect it. The tutorial is also pretty basic and doesn't explain some of the games mechanics. Like I didn't even know I could use the number keys to select specific abilities! Opening chests also isn't explained in the tutorial, but there is an entry in Tips and Tricks that does. Maybe this was an attempt to add some "secret mechanics" to the game for the player to go "ah-ha!" when they figure it out. But it should've just been explained in the tutorial. 3.) Roguelike? - This might be more of a personal preference, but I don't think this concept works well as a roguelike. I think this game would be better with a more level-to-level structure with some sort of story. Maybe make it a puzzle game too? Something that better takes advantage of the game's various mechanics and better utilizes its abilities. I'm not 100% sure on how you would design a game like this, but I don't think roguelike is it. Or, at the very least, the game really needs to be improved or expanded upon in order for it to "gel" with me as a roguelike. 4.) Various Feedback - I didn't want to retread too much of what has been mentioned in other reviews, but I do agree that this game needs music, a better state machine when swapping between control and keyboard/mouse, and better detection on what input is currently in use. While I don't think the visuals are bad, they are a bit generic. I think recruiting an artist to give this game a more unique or visually interesting artstyle would really benefit this game's appeal. In conclusion, I do not think this game is worth $10. At most, you might get 40 minutes of gameplay before the gameplay loop looses steam. Pick it up and try it when it's on sale for $5 or less. If I could give this game a more neutral rating, I would. As I don't hate the game, but it's not as fun as I would've hoped. But I do see potential in it, if the developer continues to improve upon it.