Dawn of the Celestialpod Reviews

Good game, but should have been called Star Squidizen.

Follow my curator page for more reviews like this at [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32939373]Phenix Emporium[/url] Provided the developers work to improve the movement mechanics a bit (in ways I'll mention below) as well as add in a settings menu with at the very least audio options, then I can recommend this game. At its core Dawn of the Celestialpod is physics-based platformer, you play as a space squid that evolved from a starfish and has escaped its alien captors only to turn back around and invade those same alien spaceships in an attempt to free your space starfish brethren. When you evolved you acquired two long tentacles, you launch these tentacles out to move by grappling onto the environment as well as using them to interact with it which in theory is a pretty interesting mechanic and in practice almost works, unfortunately given two specific issues you don't feel in control of your squid many times especially when you are in a time crunch and being rushed as each time you rescue a starfish the alien spaceship starts a self-destruct timer and you must escape. The two issues with the movement system are fairly big ones, one is the physics, now I understand that you are in space and all that, but your squid is just too floaty and keeps too much momentum as well as having far too much bounce off of obstacles, it makes trying to maneuver in the small spaces of the alien ships very difficult, the level design often calls for precision but the physics and controls lack that. Speaking of the controls, when you fire out a tentacle it seems to fire from where it currently is, so basically if you were trying to get through a small gap in a wall, you initially fire your tentacle in order to pull yourself towards the wall, then you try firing again to get through the small space and that tentacle just hits the wall again, and since they are constantly trailing behind you and take a bit to return even relatively close to your body, it is a bit of a mess. Now with that said, you could certainly work around these constraints and learn to play with them just fine if the levels didn't take place in small spaces and physics wasn't so floaty and bouncy. Both these issues combined make for an unnecessarily difficult time trying to just maneuver around the place. The other issue that very much needs to be worked on is adding a settings menu at the very least with audio support as well as toning down the initial opening audio volume, it is very loud (rip headphone users). Also while the game does indeed support keyboard/mouse and gamepads it does not allow you to hotswap them, so if you start up the game with a controller plugged in, you cannot use the keyboard unless you close the game, unplug the controller, and then start the game back up, and vice-versa, so that would certainly be a very helpful, at the very least just having a switch in the settings menu (provided one gets added) that let you manually decide which you wanted to use. If this game receives the support and updates that it very much needs, then this could be a really fun and unique physics-platformer, I very much hope it does as I would certainly enjoy seeing what the rest of the game has to offer.