I played a bit of Valley 1 and recently got around to trying Valley 2. I'm going to be brutally honest here, but I don't want to bash, I hope that the developers can take what I say to heart and improve.
First off, I really like the strategic side of the game. It does a good job at forcing tough choices and there always seems to be a multiple possibilities when choosing where to go comes up. My biggest gripe might be that the starting purified area feels too small and that it really feels like you're just running survivors down corridors until you hit one of those purification towers. I think the game might benefit by tweaking it to make the purification area 2 squares instead of one and reducing the number of perk tokens required to unlock traits. This would cut down a bit on the repetitive portion of the platform and give more time to the strategic side, as well as fixing the corridor situation of early game. Naturally, Demonaice would likely need an extra point of movement or to come out earlier to counter this.
The platforming side could use a lot of work though. The overall game design seems to be at odds with itself. The game rewards avoiding hits with mechanics like caliber and concentration, but other mechanics favor ablative HP like enemies with very large attack patterns, fast moving attack patterns, a VERY large library of attack pattern to anticipate, and rapid moving projectiles. The large hitbox relative to the viewable area also makes it very easy to outrun your headlights, so to speak, and take lots of hits. The classes also seem very, very strange. A lot of the difficulty seems to stem from player attacks being extraordinarily obtuse. I played my first hour as the tier 1 fire mage and just being able to shoot stuff directly was nice and simple. Then I tried the tier 2 plant mage and while shots that mimic the player's movement seem interesting, it was extremely difficult to make use of in the largely variable terrain with lots of high caliber shots incoming.
Some notes that I think would improve the platforming:
- Make the character stouter. A lot of popular platformers keep the character within a 1x1 to 1x2 ratio. From Super Mario to Super Meat Boy. This makes it easier to keep track of dodging attacks, specially during jumps. This also makes animation easier. My character seems to rapidly shift from 1x5 to 1x1 during an attack animation, which is disorienting.
- Make facing follow the mouse cursor. It's very frustrating to need to shoot behind me and my character not turning automatically with the mouse.
- Give the camera more leeway when looking down. It's very easy to fall down onto an ememy or thorn bush because they can't be seen.
- Lava. When I ran into this it totally threw me by surprise. Up until this point there was nothing to fear from falling except for a bit of damage. Perhaps a simple shallow pool before the unescapable pit in the evil overload tower is needed to introduce this feature.
- "You need to be closer." No, just no. This feels like a very, very shoehorned mechanic to make monsters that might otherwise be sniped more relevant.
- Streamline goals. Usually the goal is to go right. Sometimes to goal is to go up. Caves break this mold, which is fine, but sometimes caves mix in needing to go horizontally, even going left! This can cause confusion.
There, I just wanted to get that off my chest.
