_Got 12934. :wink:_
Where to begin with this?
This game leaves me so conflicted. There's so many good things going for it: the graphics, while minimal, are still pretty slick with all the glitchy effects and particles, the audio fits great, the variety of mechanics is impressive for a game jam game, and you even got a boss fight in. Overall, it comes off as very polished (which is even more impressive given this is a 1-man submission).
However (you knew there would be a "however", didn't you? :stuck_out_tongue:), this game has a bit of an identity crisis. A lot of the elements scream "intense action run-and-gun", such as the bullet ricochet, the deathswap, and the grapple. But a lot of the map design rewards stealth and strategic planning over reckless action.
Often I was punished for charging ahead as I can barely see 10 feet to the right and shooting an enemy offscreen that is clearly shooting at me can sometimes be a fatal mistake (particularly during the car chase section) when you deathswap. This is probably easiest to resolve as you could simply zoom out further (when aiming the mouse close to the edge of the screen? Or just in general).
On top of that, the wall jump is super hit-or-miss (I think some grace frames when you swap left/right arrow keys would help avoid missed inputs) resulting in the occasional failed recovery when I misjudged a jump distance (prior to unlocking grapple), thus requiring me to take things slower as failure equals immediate restart to the previous section. Not sure what the best approach at rectifying that issue is, perhaps either an _"oops you fell, here's 1hp left and we'll bounce you high enough to recover from the missed jump"_ or simply more frequent checkpoints (not sure I'm a fan of the 2nd option, that seems to be part of the appeal of the game). Ledge grab may be another solution.
And compounding on all of that is the fact that a lot of the mechanics aren't really explored to their full potential. I know this is almost certainly due to time constraint, but I feel like I should mention it for completeness sake. I wish the grapple was one of the first things introduced since it's one of the mechanics that's both super practical _and_ really fun. On the other hand the core throwing ricochet makes for cool trick shots, but really can be disregarded aside from the fact that throwing the core regens HP. It would have also been a nice touch to have the core throwing have some callback in the boss fight (ex: a fight stage that has high walls so you have to ricochet from above) since it seems to be a _core_ (pun) part of the game.
On a lesser note, but still worth mentioning, the background colors and moving patterns behind the boss made it really hard to see the bullets which caught me off guard completely the first time. Simply making them like, blue or something would help that.
With all that being said, the game was fairly technically impressive with 2D reflections and the slick screen distortion transitions. As a fellow dev who's totally into that kinda thing, congrats, here's my official seal of "I like it :thumbsup:". :stuck_out_tongue:
If this was to be a full game, I definitely see potential with some of the rough edges polished out. One of the better entries I've played so far, despite all it's shortcomings, so well done, you got me to write a short essay lol.