SS Immolation

Love, Love, Love this game!! I have little experience in games so this was a totally new type of game for me. Each new monster was frustratingly fun to discover their weakness, and was very satisfying when defeated. I also saw many places I could have scored more points which gives me motivation to play again and explore more!  

Pretty awesome game!!!! So, I'm gonna talk about the Pros first, and keep in mind that I loved this.  

Pros:
-Tone and Design were fantastic and consistent, it feels like a complete game experience, nothing feels lackluster or out of place. 
-Rhythm game! A very unique take on the genre and I loved it. Combat rhythm is always cool and fun and I approve.
-Bullets, Every bullet was clear as to what it did from a visual standpoint, (Minus ONE but the rest were stellar, so it is a pro.) This added another small layer to the game that kept me on my toes. 
-Exploring! I loved exploring, it gave me almost Metroid vibes with the space art style and the exploration, and not a lot of games take advantage of this style.
-The theme of Self-destruction never got old and it never felt out of place. Everytime I won, I was filled with a sense of failure, as if I wasn't supposed to explode. I'm not sure if this was on purpose, but it added to the game a lot for me.

-Cherry Bombs were satisfying

-Ending boss was a cool mix of all the bullets, and looked cool. 
-Score system was really fun

Cons:
-Rapidly tapping my finger to move vs Holding it down

-Zoomed in view made it hard to gauge enemy locations, especially from the bottom. 
-Dual monsters were meh, hard to keep track of, and even if you didn't lose points, missing bullets felt bad and was a weird mindset to get used to, especially when in most rhythm games missing means less points. 
-More visual feedback from hitting bullets would have helped.

-The learning curve was kind of insane for the size of the game. I restarted about 7 times just to fully understand the second enemy encounter. I see what you tried to do with the arrows for the first encounter, but it made it much more confusing for the second encounter. I kept asking "Are these different bullets with different values?" I should have assumed it was the directions, but in rhythm games, new designs for notes after just getting two new ones is always scary. 

Overall? Really cute fun game, and one of your best works!

The combat in this was stunning. Once I figured out how to deal with black/white projectiles, it felt super good fighting the monsters. Then, having to deal with two monsters at once felt like a great, natural progression in difficulty. It's amazing being able to take out two different monsters at the same time without getting hit. I'm still surprised how good movement feels in battle.

On the other hand of the combat, I'm still unclear what the punishment for getting hit is. Less points? Also, even though they're still beatable, it feels unfair when two enemies attack with patterns so different bullets hit you in the first and fourth rows at the same time. I want to perfect them, dammit!

Reading the genre as "rhythm" helped me figure out the mechanics much faster than I would have otherwise. The exploration aspect of the game was simple, but serviceable. I especially love the space worm's design.

Overall, a very endearing game!

I know there was definitely more to do but first time through, I enjoyed the concept as well as the variety of mobs, the mixing of mob types, and their different bullet patterns. As someone who usually doesn't play too many games, at first, I had some difficulty understanding the forward and backwards arrow mechanic as well but I think once I got the hang of it, one if the great things about it is that it basically trains your from there to get use to it, like the type of muscle memory that games make you build in order to use them with quicker reaction times. I don't know the max score but one of the things I found was that I wasn't really incentivized to explore more. Sometimes I would see gems and such that I could get with more bombs but I was most driven to beat the game and if I thought my score was high enough to move on to the next stage without too much score casualty, I did. But again, take that with a grain of salt because I'm not the completionist-type.