Mononeko Reviews

I played until the 1st boss, failed and the game crashed. The game has potential, but as a Patapon player I must say that it needs a lot of refining, and sadly, there are likely many things Patapon did right and has registered a patent for each and single one of those. I know the game is not a high budget game, it is actually really cheap, but I still asked for a refund. I will give my suggestions as far as possible, but I don't think I will be playing this again. The drum on the top of the screen is hard to see. Patapon has the screen border flash, which is a very clear and hard to miss a beat. That is likely patented, so the dev has to think of something else, but on a big screen that is pretty hard. The controls are very unintuitive for a Japanese controller layout. I understand the XXYY, XXBB and XXAA are relative to the American(SNES) layout controller, because the buttons are top, mid and bottom, but for someone used to the Japanese(SFC) layout, this is just horrible. Y is on the left, B is at the bottom, A is on the right. Just changing the layout in Steam is not going to help because I am used to that layout, and will just keep pressing the wrong buttons. Maybe adding controller mapping to other controllers in the settings can help. There's no "step back" function. I died because I moved too forward in the 1st boss, and cannot attack the boss at all. I know I suck at rhythm games, but I liked Patapon so much that I can play without sound. This game's beat is just somehow so hard to grasp or that the tolerance is too high that I don't know if I get the right beat or not. I can go pretty random and still pass the command, but the command can also suddenly be stopped because I hit the button either a bit too fast or too slow. Everything feel off, wanted it to be at least a good game, but it is beyond my grasp right now.

After finishing the early access, there are multiple instances in which the player experience can be broken. First and foremost, the performance of the game. There are some performance issues in the game that needs to be looked into. I could see the assets being loaded real time, having the missing textures as it's replacement during it. There are also instances of frame drops and the game just lagging in general. Any instance of lag will ruin the experience, making it impossible to even get past the first note of a command. Continuing with the music and sound. I have observed that the music does not align with the metronome after a while. Though, it seems even with the music on mute, it does not matter as being on beat with the metronome is more important. However, being a rhythm game, it is quite upsetting. I have also observed that even without any noticeable frame drops or lag, I sometimes miss a beat. It could be that the timing was strict, I was too fast or slow, or the aforementioned performance issues. Now, I do not have any experience with music, so i do not have much comments. Apart from it being sounding the same? However, with the gameplay, personally, it does not fit well. Now, for the actual gameplay. The rougelite itself takes place in the level design, enemy and obstacles spawning, and the shop, so I am not going to go too deep into that. However, it sometimes leads into funny encounters with having 2 dead cats or 7 digging sapling enemies in a row. It also leads into this annoying instance in which any balloon moving into the armored balloon will collide with it, making this collision sound over and over. As for the rhythm gameplay, with the problems with performance, and the music becoming boring as the gameplay moves on, it's quite disappointing. Next, the rhythm gameplay being inspired by Patapon. I should state that the gameplay itself is not similar to Patapon, just inspired. Rather than having a break between commands, you can continuously order commands and cancel commands anytime, you just have to be on beat. I don't know if this is the intended gameplay. Although, continuous commands such as attacking (and the only command you will be spamming) will make them not attack anymore. Combined with the music, it does not feel right? Like the music does not interact with the gameplay? I don't know how to properly convey this. It might be because of that lingering Patapon nostalgia, but I feel like the gameplay should somehow interact with the music. Crypt of the Necrodancer does this very well. The difficulty of the game is not hard. There might be enemy spams, but the defend command negates all damage for a short time. I believe the difficulty comes from inputting the commands with the aforementioned issues. There are also instances of enemy attacks not damaging the players. I noticed this with the fox enemy not damaging the cats, even if I didn't do anything to defend. The bosses are quite easy because of the commands. The bosses should attack more. I like the art of the game, however, after viewing it for quite some time, I notice it doesn't blend well together. What should be the foreground feels like the background at times. This also leads to obstacles like the gate, being out of place. I believe the designs could better. However, this is far from being a problem and more of a personal gripe. I also like that they want to give voice to animal abuse, but the current story and design of the game does not convey it properly. That ends my review. In its' current state there needs to be a lot of polishing and fixing. Combining rougelite, rhythm, and combat is difficult, but I do hope the developers succeed.

Fun rhythm game good story i hope it gets lots of updates in the future