Mr. Sun's Hatbox Review (AcidSweat)
I've been rewriting this review many times every time I've been noticing something new that bugged me about this game. I'm changing my review rom negative to positive, but I'd rather leave it neutral. I like very much the game, but there's many things that tarnishes the impression.
Let me start off with the positives. The concept of the game is very interesting and the game loop is very addictive. That's what you want from every roguelikes. The game represents a mixture of Nongunz and MGS. And frankly I don't see any similarity with Spelunky as other players do. (But I only played Spelunky 2 for 1000 hours, so maybe I'm wrong.)
I like the idea that the hats (power ups) can be used not only when you wear them, but also when they're lying around. It pushes the player to use different tactics and it can creates very funny combos. The weapons has less variety, but it's cool because you don't depend on weapons and use them occasionally.
My first minor gripe is that you can't climb the ladders from a stand still position. It makes you feel that you're not really in control of character. It's a platformer so imo the controls should be fluid. It'll be better to use X button solely to pick and drop a weapon, while the B button will do the same with hats. Because when you have a bunch of stuff in a pile you can't pick up what you want. It'll be very helpful if you could drop a weapon (instead of tossing it) just like you can do with the hats. You can't snap necks while holding anything so it'll be an improvement. There was a situation when a corpse was blocking a weapon and I couldn't pick it up because my character was afraid of corpses.
The whole mechanic that every character has pervs and cons isn't fleshed out. It doesn't make the game more difficult, but more annoying. Especially when you have the characters that blink all the time (make
the screen black every few seconds), have minor visibility (changes the resolution to 640x480), can't hear properly (lower the volume to the minimum) etc. It doesn't make the game any more challenging, but obnoxious. It's like in the game Blazing Beaks. The only difference is that it's the player who choose to pick up bad artefacts while here you're punished from the beginning. Not every bad characteristic is bad. Just keeps the ones that actually changes the gameplay.
I hope the devs will continue polishing the game, because it has so much potential!