Catalyst: From The Stars

Not usually a fan of boomer shooter style games but this is great fun. The smooth parrying and the balancing act between your primary and secondary fire make for a great experience. The shotgun boss has got to be my favourite, a challenge at first then so satisfying after a couple of attempts to get the parry's off.

TL:DR It feels like a resource game where the resource is not my energy, health, or stamina, but my patience. I will go through the pros first, because there are things I like about this game, but the cons are gonna be far more extensive. I adore everything visually going on with the game. The icon for an attack coming that has to be parried is great (though I will talk about parrying more when I talk about combat loop). Also a few areas you fight in feel nice for the kinds of fights they are. Foggy bridge fight is nice, but the boss rushing at you from the fog is a great use of it, and more of that would’ve been what I wanted to see. I also like that, when you go to the menu, you are squared up against the boss. That’s some visual fun. I hate to say that’s where pros end but I have more on the negative side to say about the game, from a variety of angles. This is going to be primarily for the dev, and I am trying to be as constructive as I can with all of this. Cool? Cool. Having no keybind options really hurts what the game can feel like, and I wanna explain why with the biggest outlier of the issue with the parry. For context, I am on keyboard, maybe this is just fine on con…

hate to leave a negative review for a scrappy indie game like this but it has some pretty big issues that stop it from being enjoyable for me [list] [*] the settings menu has three sliders, two for volume and one for difficulty - no way to control mouse sensitivity or acceleration (this is patched over with the lock-on mechanic, but i'm not a fan of how much that affects player movement and awareness) [*] your main defensive options are parrying and dodging, but... [*] enemy animations are very stiff and jerky, making it difficult to read their attacks and prepare to parry at the right time [*] enemy hitboxes seem dubious at times, with attacks covering huge arcs while the enemies jump and dash all over the place, making the previous problem worse [*] successful parry feedback is very subtle, with no visual feedback at all [*] getting hurt tints the screen red, once for every tick of damage and maybe proportionately to damage taken? so when a boss like the backflipping shotgun guy or milos hits you sometimes your screen can go completely red for seconds at a time, completely blinding you and basically guaranteeing a game over [*] battle visibility is qu…

This game is a gorgeous game featuring beautiful ps1 style graphics, crunched down sfx and a beautiful soundtrack. The gameplay can be a bit tough to grasp at first but once you understand it, it clicks together so well. You can dash, jump, strafe, shoot, melee and parry. As you shoot and parry you build heat and then heat can be used with melee to do insane damage to the bosses. This game is a really well done game and I recommend it to anyone who wants a fun ps1 styled boss rush!

i guess its a cup o' tea :3 fun

So I gotta say, I like the risk vs reward of building up heat to get strong melee attacks vs just sitting back and shooting. The fact it means the optimal way to play the game is the fun way to play is a very nice aspect of the combat loop. The parries were a little difficult for me to get used to (my own fault) but once you get them down, it really makes the fights able to flow very smoothly between defense, ranged offence and melee dps annihilation. Once you learn the punish windows and parries, bosses go from hard to counter to being a sometimes very smooth flowing experience. The game has its issues but they're more than easy enough to overlook due to it being a first major project. Overall - 8/10, considering what it is