Robz Rush

Hi, I've played a significant amount of Hunter mode as CyBot (furthest boss I've gotten to was the little guy with five platforms around it) and a little bit of Survivor, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on this game.

I really like various things about this game. The bosses have fairly simple patterns, but the limited HP helps most of them feel quite challenging in a fair way regardless, and the random variants each run help keep the gameplay varied. Giving every boss a last ditch attack is an interesting decision to keep the player on their toes. I like the alien setting and the detail of some bosses appearing in the background during fights with other ones, and the art style used to portray it feels quite unique.

However, I do have multiple gripes with the game, most of them minor but some of them major, that made me enjoy it a bit less than it could have.

• The fact that aiming and moving are mapped to the same buttons is quite hard to get used to, and even after that trying to simultaneously hit the bosses consistently and dodge their attacks without spread shot upgrades can be frustrating. Especially against the bosses that fly above you, which is almost every boss I've found so far.
• I know the whole point is for it to be a boss rush game, but I feel like Hunter mode in particular could really use some kind of checkpoint system, maybe one every 5 bosses or so? Right now the later stages of the gamemode feel very tedious and the infinite lives near-pointless compared to Survivor's one life, because every time you die you have to redo every single previous boss anyway, making it frustrating to learn the tougher fights, and unlike in Survivor it feels more like a waste of time than part of the challenge because most of those fights are completely trivialized by the amount of upgrades you've probably gathered at that point. The fact that there's a repetitive spaceship scene at the start of every run doesn't help.
• On a related note to the previous point, the game appears to have a "Load Game" function, but no apparent way to actually save a game first. And there's a possible glitch that makes it so clicking that option and then pressing "Back" will make the screen go black for a few seconds and then close the game, instead of returning to the main menu.
• There's little indication of what exactly each upgrade does, which can make early runs feel a bit too reliant on trial and error. Additionally, sometimes the bars will start rapidly flashing black after opening the menu, and I can't tell if it's intentional or a glitch.
• The green owl's laser attack is kind of painful to look at, with how quickly it flashes and zooms around the player. Maybe the game should have a flashing lights warning just for that and the aforementioned upgrade bars.
• Some bosses, like the boulders and the hopping cyclops things, appear to be able to instantly kill the player on contact regardless of health upgrades, which can feel a bit cheap when it first happens considering many other bosses don't do this. Particularly during the fight with the two red boulders, where you might accidentally walk into one of them trying to pick up the crystals that appear at the start of the fight. If you think this is important for the design of the fights, I'd recommend trying to communicate the fact that they can one shot the player beforehand more clearly.
• This one's subjective and I understand if it's not a priority in the first place, but in terms of visuals, I think some of the more earthly boss designs clash a lot with the games' otherwise alien setting, especially the birds.

Also, I saw this game on that one feedback chain post and couldn't reply for various reasons, so I'll try to answer the other questions you asked there that I'm more neutral about:

• I don't quite understand how exactly the upgrade prices scale at the moment, but I think they're fine as they are now.
• I like the random bosses as they are at the moment, but I think selectable bosses could work as a separate gamemode, especially for practicing the harder fights without having to go through multiple easy ones first.
• I think most attacks are simple enough to see coming or react to, in big part because of the focus on ranged combat and the relatively simple patterns each boss has, but I did get surprised by some things that might be worth looking into. Do note that I'm not particularly good at this game, though, so some of this might just be a me problem.
  
  • One of the possible boulder bosses would always shoot three projectiles at varying arcs at once, but I found it very hard to tell what trajectory it would pick each time. I'm not sure if there's a pattern I haven't spotted yet or if it's just random, but it alone made the boss surprisingly hard and frustrating for how early it can be encountered.
  • I can't remember what it looked like, but when fighting one of the flying bosses on the spaceship it would fire small projectiles upwards and rain them back down for most of the fight, which allowed me to stay a bit closer to it than with most others, before suddenly firing a single, massive projectile straight at me that I couldn't dodge at that distance. For almost every other fight I think the focus on ranged combat helps make up for the general lack of windup animations, but because of how close it feels you're allowed or even encouraged to get to this specific boss I think the big projectile should have one such animation or some other kind of telegraph to make it feel more fair.
  • There's some bosses that seem to behave notably different between attempts despite looking the exact same each time. For example, my first encounter with the brown worm boss had it use the fire shockwave exactly once at the very start before switching to short underground lunges and then waves of projectiles, but on a later encounter it spammed the fire attack throughout the first half of it before switching to the projectiles. I'm not entire sure how these inconsistencies works or if they're even intentional, but if they're meant to be random variants like other earlier bosses I think they should give the boss a different sprite to match.

Overall, I think it's a pretty solid game, and quite fun as it is if you have enough patience, but it could be much better with some more work. I hope this feedback helps.

Looks neat! I think I'll give it a try later!