Game:

Counter-Strike: Source (2004)

Duration: 0:00

949 views

27

I have a lot to say about the game and it probably won't fit in the video description, so I'll talk generally about the game here, and then move on to survival / scoring / specific patterns in a separate comment.

This game... is a massive wildcard. It has very good ideas and stylish execution, but the balancing is ??? and there are a bunch of random miscellaneous things that seriously impacted my enjoyment of it. Let's go over the main points.

The good:
The presentation.
The music is great and the backgrounds are very pretty. The Miko fight in particular is largely synced to the music, and it makes it that much more cinematic.

Combo system + stage design (for the most part).
Stages are largely satisfying to route, with a moderate caveat that's only relevant to scoring. Very often there's a somewhat obvious "intended" overall idea for how to do a particular stage section, but the system leaves you with enough freedom as to how you want to specifically pull that off (unlike in EIoS, where there really is only one correct answer).

Boss pacing.
Balancing gripes aside, I really like how hectic and dynamic the boss patterns are. There's very little downtime/filler and even the easy patterns keep you on your toes. (This might be stockholm syndrome)

General gameplay handling.
Hitboxes are really lenient (probably to compensate for the insane difficulty), and character movement feels natural. There's no noticeable input lag or animation sluggishness.


The bad:
Shot type balance.
Reimu is by far the best shot, but this is largely because she's the only one that isn't bad or annoying to use. Also, her passive ability clears all small enemies on-screen every time she gets a combo, which is very useful on stages.
Marisa's lasers have a PCB SakuyaB aiming-type gimmick, but it's way more useless. The lasers have pathetic movement range (it feels like 15 degrees off the vertical or something) so they're not viable for any strategic positioning purposes. Also, boss patterns are so dynamic in this game and you have to move around so much that most of the time your lasers will be off-target anyway. I'd honestly like the shot a lot more if it was just a piercing forward focus.
Ichirin is unusable. She does high point-blank damage and terrible long-range damage, but you can't pointblank anything in the game anyway. Also, her unfocused speed is too high and her focused speed is literally FDF Patchouli.

Bosses bouncing you away if you get too close to them.
There's no indication for how close you can get to the boss before this happens, and frankly the radius feels way too large. It's also very disorienting, and even if you aren't sent directly into a bullet, you'll probably die while trying to find your character on screen. This can actually kill you on circling spells; I got 1MNB to Miko LS because of this and I was traumatised. Please just get rid of this.

The reset system.
This game gives you the ability to reset to the start of the current stage, rather than resetting the whole run. This sounds great for casual play, but it's a huge problem for assessing the legitimacy of survival and scoring runs, especially if there's no way to tell whether, or how many times, a stage was reset. Even if there was an indicator, I don't imagine it would be too hard to edit out.


The ???:
Overall difficulty.
This feels more like SoHW Lunatic Extra than it does the first three stages of Lunatic. Patterns are both too difficult and too tanky. I guess, if this was a 3 stage fangame, this might still be barely tolerable, but it isn't; this is crazy for the first half of a full game.

Game length.
This demo is 17 minutes. For reference, the first 3 stages of HSoB with a black gem takes around 15:30.

Effect spam.
You can really get sensory overload if you don't turn off like 90% of the effects in the game settings.

My feature wishlist:
Can the end of stage summary screen be shown in replays as well? I really liked that feature.
Save replay and quit to title
Add a toggle for the fast reset feature in practice mode, so that failed runs can be saved for analysis.
Replay naming
Replay info display should show less useless information and more useful information. Don't show me how many point / flake items I got, show me the final score and the miss/bomb count!
Miss/bomb counter could be like SoHW, starting off golden, and turning red once you're no longer on perfect pace. (This is useful because the game doesn't count last spell failures as deaths.)
Things like spell capture bonus and "bonus failed" should always be visible, not tied to the effect setting.
The ability to practice the rest of the stage starting from a particular chapter (not just that bit in isolation)
Stage practice should start with max resources
The ability to edit your starting gauge for stage practice / chapter practice

TL;DR: This game has a lot of potential. Don't mess up the balancing and you're golden.

Other Statistics