I've played some more - unlocked two characters, the store, and some other fun stuff. I even made it past the 1st boss (there's 2, the second is the top of the pyramid, and there are 3 pyramids). So, there's a lot of stuff to do in this game. And the upgrade tree is long, and deep. And there's also a bunch of other things to unlock.
And, the game plays fast and is "fine". There's one particular design decision that has been bugging me though - especially since I made it past the first boss and then died almost instantly.
The game has scrolls - which are like boons and artifacts from other rogue-like games. This is fun. Some are more useful than others, etc. BUT, some are bad. So bad that they can immediately cost you the game. And this has happened to me multiple times. I understand that the drops are random, and what you get is random, but it really ends up feeling like you're having an experience of empowerment - and then you randomly lose through no fault of your own.
I lost because the scroll I got for defeating the boss randomly gave me a weapon - and the weapon was a flare gun with a really slow reload and the first area I wandered into spawned a ton of frogs and there was just no way to defeat them without getting overwhelmed. Game over.
That was not a fun player experience for me.
And, I think there's an easy fix for this - make the bad scrolls a choice: you grab a scroll and there are two good ones and a bad one. If you want the good ones, you have to take the bad one (sort of like what Shotgun King does - where you choose a good thing and a bad one). That way, you can decide not to take the boon and bad... Here, you just randomly get it as soon as you pick it up and you hope for the best.
I really did want to like this game more than I did in the end. I'm not sure what it was - the writing? the level design? Or, maybe, I'm just not "there" for games like this? I even wonder if this game was "too much" for me (too many units and different kinds of things). I did think the "tutorial" was taking way too long to get to some interesting stuff...but again, maybe I'm just being impatient here.
The other day I was discussing the importance (or lack of) "national origin" in games - and I remember this game. As far as I recall, it's made by a South African team. So, it's an African game. But, in what ways? Is it culturally influenced by a South African perspective? Is the game a South African satire of 80s US film culture? An homage? I don't know the answers to these questions - and it makes me think - if I had to pick "an African videogame" (lets say I was curating a collection of "games from all over the world") which game would/should I pick? I have no idea.
I have this as part of a two-game combo pack with Skulls of the Shogun. So far I'm more of a fan of the other game than this one. BUT, that's mostly because this game is hard, takes a lot to control the ships really well, and I'm not very good at it.
I don't understand the rogue-like elements it has either. It seems like I should occasionally just leave a mission and do it over? But, that way not losing the resources picked up along the way?
I guess what I haven't like is that, two missions in, I got to a point where I barely won - one health remaining! But, I started the next mission with one health. It makes sense with the story - the whole fleet being destroyed and my being the last fighter left and all that, but still. I guess this is where "smart me" would have gone out, gathered stuff, turned tail, and repeated a few times until I was all patched up? But, that feels like a cop-out. Also, I don't even know if that would work? Supposedly the levels are generated each time - they have a different named author even, but - my experience re-playing one over and over a few times was that they stayed pretty much the same except for once where there was different pickup... so, weird?
