Broforce - First play
22022-01-07. First play. Picked this up as it was a Contra-like, pixel-art, run-n-gun shooter. Unfortunately, the game spends too much time on juicing up the effects (which I totally get; most games fall flat) at the expense of usable gameplay, with easily readable (i.e. communication & messaging from game to user) content. The game is more of a Spelunky-style game where you have levels designed with much dynamic content where you must figure your path through.
Player 1 is my brother, Matthew Doucette. I am playing Player 2.
Pros:
pixel art is mostly very cool
juice is added everywhere (just too much)
many dynamic objects that impact the game
much of the terrain is destructible (perhaps all of it)
you can respawn your comrade by rescuing characters
anyone rescued can spawn if you die, so the more rescues, the more lives (though this is a game design flaw; at first, you have only 1 life, and have to learn this the hard way. Good game design should work before becoming knowledgeable about their inner workings.)
end of mission shows recap of deaths, including your own
Cons:
the game's UI and UX is just bad; you have to go through it and learn it the hard way, which is exactly opposite of proper design
when people are figuring out how to sign-in into the game to join, the game goes through needless juice effects to show off and make it difficult to follow
the screen shake is just at the nonsense level. The game implements a bullshit joke where the shake goes back to 100% after you set it lower. Thus the UI shows that it's clearly known the screen-shake is much too high, and it jokes back. Taking away control from the user is just poor design. Making a joke doesn't improve this. Finally, the design of too much juice doesn't hide bad gameplay. If the gameplay does not survive no juice, then adding it doesn't fix or hide it. I get the idea of juicing/screenshake; i've likely made it too strong in games, but I always tune it to be impactful but never to degrade gameplay nor use it excessively to hide bad gameplay/graphics, nor use it just for a wow factor. While tuning can be misjudged, outright overkill is just very poor design. This is a very typical indie dev mistake: often the best designs cannot be seen (e.g. you only notice bad fonts, but rarely notice good fonts. e.g. you only notice snail-slow menu transitions, you never notice quick & smooth transitions.). The lesson is to stop showing off your programming prowess, and instead, design a game.
even the UI selection has ridiculous amount of screen shake that immediately messaged to me, before I started to play, that the game was going to be plagued by this decision to go over-the-top with these juice effects. It is annoying simply to change a menu selection from one item to the next.
your characters are thrown into gameplay without first knowledge of weapons you have, they appear random, and one character throws dynamite that can immediately kill yourself or your partner.
enemies with guns will shoot and kill you from off-screen, with bullets fast enough you cannot avoid them through arcade twitch reaction (i.e. gameplay that empowers the player)
drop off zone often (always?) has a big gap that you have to jump over
boss can be tricked by attacking it from the back (?!)
when one player grabs chopper ladder, the level blows up and kills the other (?!) The game is very unempowering. Flash is not substance. Respecting the gamer is more important than juice flash.
My playlists:
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Voxel:
Road:
Ray Casting 3D:
Side-Scroll Shmup:
MonoGame Tutorial: • Arena Shmup Demo #1 - Tiled Arena, Pl...
My websites:
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my GitHub: https://github.com/JDoucette
my company: http://xona.com/
my Blog: http://thefirstpixel.com/