First impressions:
- Collision is spotty. For example, ducking while standing next to a wall will make you clip through things
- This comes to a head in the Volcano stage, where I clipped through the bottom floor and as a result was falling infinitely until I chose to restart the stage. I would imagine this can also happen anywhere else in a level where you're near the bottom
- Combat isn't as smooth as I would like or expect
- Slashing makes you commit to whatever momentum you have with no way of stopping or adjusting yourself, causing you to crash into oncoming enemies/attacks
- Decent level theme variety
- Bosses in general take way more damage than I would expect
- Serious issues with what's considered a background element and an interactable object
- Levels last longer than they should, clocking in at 5-8 minutes when around 3-4 would suffice
- Being able to buy more than one of each item from a vending machine would be nice, especially the smaller restorative items
- I would suggest either giving the player finite inventory space or an upper limit on how much of an item they can buy
- The humor in the boss dialogue was cringe and/or not for me
Alright so I will first and foremost preface that I am not an avid player of Mega Man or any of its platforming brethren, so take my own experience and what I say with a grain of salt.
I'll start with the levels themselves. While I do appreciate the variety presented I also noticed some glaring flaws with how they're designed and how they look. Firstly, I've been confused by what I can interact with and what is only a background element in a fair few stages, namely Millennium Museum and Neon Garden.
In Millennium Garden I was not aware that the colored switches could be pressed to change up the level designs as their coloration and lack of sound effect upon touching them led me to believe they were just background props. There also seems to be an inconsistency with how long each TNT monitor takes to count down before exploding? Sometimes they count down normally, other times they count down quickly or slowly. Whether intentional or not it was odd to see. I also noticed some missing collision in one of the slopes.
In Neon Garden, the bright neon lights contrasted heavily with the generally darker platforms and made me think they were dangerous to touch, only to learn they are only background elements. The rails you grind on also don't look very rail-like? I did not know they were rails until I had to land on one to progress. On top of that, the rails feel awkward to use. The rest of the level's features such as water, the wind, and dandelion seed riding were fine however.
Library Labyrinth I do like conceptually and did not find too much issue with, and Volcanic Peaks could do without the harsh solid yellow background sections in the bottom half of the stages as that actively hurt my eyes as I was trying to navigate out of them.
The levels in general feel rather empty. The enemies that do happen to appear don't really pose much of a threat and are easily sidestepped, and I'd frankly chalk that up to levels being large and having more open space than necessary. I'd suggest compressing level sizes down or redesigning levels/enemies in a way where they can pose more challenge than they currently do. This would also help speed up pacing of the game as I personally didn't find much fun platforming/moving forward with very little else to do until I find the miniboss or boss.
Speaking of bosses, there's a strange discrepancy in difficulty with some of the bosses, and it's generally by poor design. Simply put, the minibosses posed almost no threat and were easy to defeat with little to no thought involved, only how quickly you can mash the attack/shoot key. As for the bosses, I could not sit through the ones for Library Labyrinth and Volcanic Peak as they both share the problem of having almost no telegraphing for their attacks, and their attacks fire off very quickly almost to the point of spamming. This was also an issue with some of the Millennium Museum and Neon Garden bosses' attacks, but their attacks were more straightforward, easy to spot, and manageable. Volcanic Peak's boss in particular gets a special mention because I could not understand why she suddenly disappears then drops a rock on you, and I'm led to believe it's a movement bug because of how instant it is. It doesn't help that your slash attack is clunky and your shot attack is quick to deplete so it was a frustrating experience fighting her.
Overall, there are a few glaring quirks that muddy it and in its current state I can't say I found what was presented to be more than a middling experience. Given that it's your first proper effort using GameMaker I wish you luck and hope to see some adjustments and improvements made on this and future projects as your experience grows.