Zombardment

To summarize, I really like this game and its style. It does have a few bugs and could use some cosmetic adjustments.

I'll list the things I liked first.

The game play is simple and intuitive, and the game itself is a style that's common and easy so anyone can play this game. It hit a certain nostalgia for me for 2 games I haven't played in a long time that I immensely enjoyed when I was a kid, so that was a nice experience.

I like the more minimal designs of the character and monsters, there's already a lot going on with you shooting and dodging and explosions and fire so not having a busy or complicated design is really nice, and it really leaves room for my imagination to take over and render the monsters in my own way.

The music and sound effects I felt were very fitting, just something cool sounding and doesn't take away your attention from the game itself.

There are other specific things I enjoyed about it but I didn't write them down so I don't remember exactly what they were, but I can tell you I really enjoyed the time I spent playing this game. At first I felt frustrated because it seemed to hard, but then I went and tried all the game modes and got better at it, then I could progress through the chapters better. I started finding strategies to beat each level and it was a lot of fun to do some casual critical thinking where I was actually getting better and advancing.

Now onto the bugs. I made a short list of issues I ran into but I didn't think to write them down until I had already encountered 2 or 3 so I'll do my best to recall the circumstances when the bug occurred.

In Endless mode, the # wave wasn't showing. After what I guessed was maybe the 6th wave the wave # was something huge like 15,679 but it would disappear and reappear every other wave or so. When I left that game mode I found that large number was actually how many points I earned. Either change the word "Wave" to "points" or make it display the wave its on properly, or both! Whatever you feel like.

In Chapter mode, I made it to Chapter 6 before it "boots" me from the level by abruptly going to the failure/try again screen. I can't say for sure when exactly it happens, I thought it might be a timed glitch thing but I noticed that my health bar wasn't going down while taking damage, so now I think the health bar is just broken and doesn't reflect remaining health properly, making it seem like the game boots you randomly. The reason why I assumed it was a bug as opposed to just dying is because the screen would cut to black abruptly, stay black for a few seconds (3-4) and then the replay menu would fade in, and it was just very different from when I normally died. So, unfortunately I haven't made it past level 6 and I can't tell if its just my HP running out or a glitch makes death happen after a certain amount of time. I did really enjoy chapter mode though, not too easy but not frustratingly difficult either. If you make any changes, please don't change the difficulty! It takes me more than a few tries to beat each level and it's sort of in a sweet spot for me (and hopefully others).

In the shop, I was able to buy, equip, and use the cannon (9k) when I only had a couple thousand dollars. I flicked through the menu and tried to buy them all and it said I couldn't, but it did give me the achievement for acquiring the laser.

Now on to the aesthetics. This is going to be all about the menus for the most part. For some reason, the bubbles in the background really bother me. They look neat, it's a cool effect, but it's super out of place and I think the menu could be improved without them. In general, I would have preferred (and expected) a more 8-bit style menu. The style of menu you have now reminds me of 00's era flash games, which isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't exactly fit the style of game that this is and I feel a more classic video game style would better suit the attitude and personality of the game. You can keep everything about the menus the same, colors, buttons, navigation, everything can stay, but just make it pixels (like the monsters), the way it is now feels out of place to me and I don't like the connection to flash games the menu gives me (I think your game is too good for flash graphics, it deserves cool looking 8-bit)

In Endless mode, it shows the dollar amount you earn on the left, but you don't get the money when you die. Unless you get to keep the money at some point in endless mode, I don't think it should be displayed on the HUD. I got all excited that I was getting X amount of dollars only to see it fall to 0.

I feel like 9k is a steep place to start buying weapons. I'd like if there was a slightly more powerful but not too much blaster between default and the canon that is easier to obtain, at like 3 or 4k or something.

I really really had a lot of fun playing party mode - timed and resistance. Challenging and engaging, I was really getting in the zone with these modes and I found it surprisingly relaxing.

I would recommend this game because it's faults don't make it unplayable (and really aren't that bad, most of the faults I found were design choice that was not that distracting and easy for me to look past) . My getting stuck on Chapter 6 might be just a thing for my on this laptop, but even without chapter mode the other 2 are equally fun and challenging.

Give this game a nice well deserved polish and I would gladly spend more on it.