Hello, Last weekend I streamed your game. Overall, it's got good legs for a game jam game but is definitely lacking some sort of hook to keep it fresh and appealing.
Although Ascentower started out as a game jam game, it definitely seems well polished at the point it is now, with randomly generated levels, turn based combat that seemed to have a lot of thought put behind skill combos and synergies, any-time-free-of-charge class changing, and some hit-or-miss humor.
The randomly generated levels is an interesting concept, though I wonder what it contributes to the game. The illusion was pretty quickly broken as I watched at each map transition the game "load" the layout. The maps are all fairly similar to each other and seemingly the only changes that may occur due to randomness are the pots, enemies, and some environmental flavor being added in. However, beyond that, it doesn't really change the game up, it doesn't really keep the player on their toes, and ultimately begs the question as to why it is there.
When it comes to the combat, it seems like the most was made out of the tried-and-true turn-based combat. While being able to change classes any time outside of combat is an interesting idea, again, it doesn't seem to offer much in the way of depth to the game. It is certainly possible my soup-for-brains may have missed potential synergies between classes, but for what I could tell during my experience with the game was that classes only had skill synergies within them, but those synergies never amounted to anything for your teammates. If this were to be expanded upon more, I really think it would be interesting to add more classes without the dev focusing on synergies, and instead allow the player to theory craft their own synergies amongst a slew of available classes.
The final major note I want to hit on is the music. The sound choice for music used is pretty rockin', but it's relentlessness in rockin' out can begin to feel fatiguing quite quickly. A few silent moments would go a long way on reducing fatigue.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Thanks for the detailed review! I do plan to make a sequel someday, so this is very helpful information.
There actually is some synergy between classes (berserker has the 'overpower' passive which boosts damage based on the difference in ATK, which works well with cryomancer's ATK debuffs, while elementalist has a few spells that reduce elemental resistances.) But yeah, in hindsight I see how stuff like that might be easy to miss.
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Hello,
Last weekend I streamed your game. Overall, it's got good legs for a game jam game but is definitely lacking some sort of hook to keep it fresh and appealing.
Although Ascentower started out as a game jam game, it definitely seems well polished at the point it is now, with randomly generated levels, turn based combat that seemed to have a lot of thought put behind skill combos and synergies, any-time-free-of-charge class changing, and some hit-or-miss humor.
The randomly generated levels is an interesting concept, though I wonder what it contributes to the game. The illusion was pretty quickly broken as I watched at each map transition the game "load" the layout. The maps are all fairly similar to each other and seemingly the only changes that may occur due to randomness are the pots, enemies, and some environmental flavor being added in. However, beyond that, it doesn't really change the game up, it doesn't really keep the player on their toes, and ultimately begs the question as to why it is there.
When it comes to the combat, it seems like the most was made out of the tried-and-true turn-based combat. While being able to change classes any time outside of combat is an interesting idea, again, it doesn't seem to offer much in the way of depth to the game. It is certainly possible my soup-for-brains may have missed potential synergies between classes, but for what I could tell during my experience with the game was that classes only had skill synergies within them, but those synergies never amounted to anything for your teammates. If this were to be expanded upon more, I really think it would be interesting to add more classes without the dev focusing on synergies, and instead allow the player to theory craft their own synergies amongst a slew of available classes.
The final major note I want to hit on is the music. The sound choice for music used is pretty rockin', but it's relentlessness in rockin' out can begin to feel fatiguing quite quickly. A few silent moments would go a long way on reducing fatigue.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Thanks for the detailed review! I do plan to make a sequel someday, so this is very helpful information.
There actually is some synergy between classes (berserker has the 'overpower' passive which boosts damage based on the difference in ATK, which works well with cryomancer's ATK debuffs, while elementalist has a few spells that reduce elemental resistances.) But yeah, in hindsight I see how stuff like that might be easy to miss.
Thanks for playing!