Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I had to use the shift key to select menu items (took a while to figure that one out). This is chrome/windows. Really cool idea and implementation.
• This game left me kind of confused, and after a good hour of trying different things I still felt short of understanding it (although I did win the first two levels eventually). Let me talk about the good first: the game is beautiful. It's visually pleasing, and has great sound effects appropriate to the theme. This hands down motivates the player to try to play and understand it. The premise of 4 factions battling for dominance, and you being able to interface with one of them and affect the battle is pretty interesting. I was not particularly sold on the 4-player local multiplayer (how many people can really fit in front of the same keyboard?), but it was still a fun concept to play around with. The game even offers three levels ( 2 tutorials) with different terrain. Unfortunately, neither the game page nor the in-game help divulge any more details. What do robots denoting with different capital letters stand for? What do I pick up the o's for? Most importantly, what's my mechs' behavior when I'm not controlling them? I rammed neutral mechs to get the advantage on the board, but then watched my army size dwindle down because my robots always got shot down - perhaps I needed to leave the mechs with some specific instructions? Send them to patrol together? I just don't know. I finally just started running around and shooting everyone myself, and that worked surprisingly well - but that felt kinda overpowered. Overall, I found it hard to call this a roguelike - it has roguelike graphics, but it's pretty much real-time, while most of the promised functionality seems more from strategy games domain than anything else. I think a bit more information about the game would go a long way.
• Completeness: All features appear to be fully implemented. However, it lagged pretty badly on the larger maps. It also dropped some inputs, proportional to the size of map / number of units. The largest map was both laggy and pretty unresponsive. Aesthetics: The game is readable and reasonably pleasing, and the UI is fully functional. It's a little unclear on how to select the level but there are no other issues. Fun: It's fairly basic (bump into neutrals to convert, mash E to shoot enemies), and there's not a lot of depth to the moment-to-moment gameplay. It has very little variety in gameplay. Innovation: I've never seen a local split-screen game, and it's pretty cool! The real-time seems like a necessity given split-screen play. Scope: It's of a reasonable scope. Traditional Roguelikeness: Quite roguelike-y except that it's real-time (though the simulation is running on turns, it's an entirely different experience).