Stratum

Finally got around to playing this. I had a great time! As with the genre, it can be kinda confusing where to go and what to do at times but I never felt 'stuck' for too long where it got frustrating. I was invested enough to keep playing. The layout of the map is pretty simple but still had good use of 'landmarks' so you can keep a sense of direction.

One thing I had some trouble with is the character controller; the player has air control when rising (with the hover powerup) but not when falling. This made precisely landing on platforms over an abyss pretty difficult to do, mostly because it's hard to tell when you stop having control of the player's movement when you're in the air. I eventually got the hang of it, though.

Another issue I had was with the cooldown on powerups. It feels arbitrary the amount of 'energy' each powerup uses. Since the enemies are really spaced out, it never required any strategy to conserve energy. I was mostly standing around waiting for it to fill back up before I could move on.

The best part of this game is the design of the powerups and how they all interact. At one point, I threw a sticky grenade at one of the floating heads and missed, hitting the ceiling, but I was able to make the head hover right into range before detonating it. Also getting a kill by detonating the grenade while it's still mid-air is really rewarding. The way the powerups interact in this game is very well done. And the enemies are intimidating enough without being overpowered or constantly in your face.

Nice work!

Very neat experience. I felt like I was thrown into this megastructure and had to figure out stuff on my own but in a positive way. There are instructions where needed but it's not holding your hands. The gameplay mechanics that you can collect are interesting and leave room for experimentation. While it is a bit disorienting to run around in the minimalist environment I thought that the way the different floors are connected and the way the respawn system works made for easy traversing. Maybe being able to add your own markers could be fun though so you know where you've been already.

The enemies don’t look too terrifying but their behavior sure is. It was a lot of fun to fight back when you progress further.

The music is nice and never gets annoying and the sounds are doing what they should, though a tiny bit more variety would definitely make a difference.

I had a fun time with this and would recommend checking it out.