Arali

Pretty nice art-style

I play a lot of student projects to try to learn, grow and inspire on my personal UE project. This is one of the worst games I have ever played. Definitely in top 10. This is so uninspired and soulless my words won't be enough to describe. Please go ahead and download to experience this buggy mess that you can't even get it to work at 1080p in this day and age. My dear God, I personally would be ashamed to put this on any mobile store let alone being on Steam.

I think it has potential, I really do, and I sorta dont want to not "not recommend" the game, but in this state its still a little rough on the edges to make it an actual fun experience. Arali is a very, very short isometric "shooter", but I wanna be careful to call it that really as in its current state its quite empty. You start the game with a tutorial and believe it introduces you to some story, but in reality the game doesnt show any story really. Your Goal is to collect 5 of those forest ghosts and you do that by very small arena fights. You only fight two kinds of enemies, yet while collecting more and more forest ghosts, they get more and more HP. As this is the only thing that you can do in this game, you can get bored quite easily, but aside from that it doesnt seem finished. Hitboxes of projectiles for example still exist in places where the projectile isnt or while it disappears, causing damage, and while in the arena fights enemies spawn inside you. The dash-attack doesnt necessarily dash the way the player wants, especially when getting close to walls where you easily get stuck on. all this aint too much of a problem cause even after you die you lose maybe like half a…

I restarted the game for the third time after accidentally clicking onto my second monitor and crashing the game; as I detached the dead weight I resolved myself to complete the game without returning a single plant baby, i.e. without healing. Unfortunately the babies stack on top of each other rather than following like ducklings and so I mistakenly assumed I had received them all; alas. Another item which was graphically difficult to distinguish was when exactly enemies spawn, although I enjoy the tactic of shooting through another creature before it spawns to damage the spitters early. The mechanics of combat are somewhat difficult to intuit, mainly because most games in a similar fashion would implement the dash in such a way as to be following the velocity of movement input, and so many such cases wherein I dash into the clump of creatures as I try to strafe around them. The game has a fun and classic Nerve balance for an isometric "twin-stick," but a few touch ups could have excelled the Land motivation insofar as complimenting Nerve; i.e. the ducklings could have easily designed more legitimacy into my self-imposed challenge of skill, not to say anything about distinguishin…

Arali is a short game where you must fight a small group of enemies and escort spirits to a tree. I personally don't mind the concept and the game looks alright to play. It does feel like a prototype and it could use some improvements. I've seen a couple of bugs and the ai could use some improvement.

Is this a student project from Digipen? It's really impressive.