Havoc Fox - SAGE '21 Demo

I was going to leave pretty negative review at first, because I tried to play through the game with a controller and it was not a pleasant experience. Gray was pretty Janky, and Venice was nearly unplayable because they constantly did their charge attack with no input. I went back to give it another try with a keyboard, because I could tell a lot of care went into the game and thought that you all probably wouldn't release this demo if it was actually that bad.

While my fingers are little sore from gaming on a keyboard, I can say I had a lot of fun. Grey and Venice are both fun to control. Of the two, Venice is definitely my favorite, because I love using the charged attack to zoom around the levels. Also, they're cute.

I do still have one big issue with the game, though. The bosses are too easy. I didn't really have to learn most attack patterns, because I would win so long as I didn't get hit by almost every attack. I think Grey's shield should be tweaked to only take a certain amount of hits then give him the boosted melee/ranged attacks after it breaks. Bosses should probably just deal more damage, because Grey and Venice both have a lot of health. The bosses might need more health too with how fast they die, but I'm not sure if they would die as fast if you had to avoid more of their attacks.

There was also a bug where I couldn't see what option I had selected in the keyboard configuration menu. I just had to count how many times I pressed down to know which option I had selected.

I'm also still hoping that controller support is improved, because boy are my hands tired.

You guys did a great job so far, keep it up!

pros;
-surprisingly fluid and smooth animations, especially backgrounds
-clean pixel art and cutscenes
-Venice the dragon is very cute and has a great design
-very freedom planet inspired and I love that. This is just freedom planet 3 by the looks of it

cons;
-controller binding wasn't detected except my dpad [used an xbox one controller]
-minior story except [oh an invasion? ok guess imma go]
-frame rate drops for both of venice's stages

I look forward to your future development!

Really cool stuff! Great art and I was surprised to see it's voice acted! Some of the readability of the backgrounds gave me trouble though (where I can stand, what are and aren't walls etc...). Ran into a weird bug too where I just sorta fell through the first ball bridge after the robot chicken mid-boss on Retro Ravine. I couldn't duplicate it on command though, it seems to just happen whenever as far as I can tell. Really excited to see where this goes though!