CHRIS:
Strife's game is certainly one of the most promising entrants to this competition. Christmas Time Heroes welds together the concept of Megaman and Mario. Obviously the gameplay is more like Megaman, but the way your chosen protagonist is required to complete objectives is very reminiscent of the 3D Mario games. These objectives vary a little, from simply beating a level and destroying a certain number of capsules, to delivering Christmas presents, to defeating a boss. But none of them detract from the run-and-gun gameplay, and in a way the missions serve to be an added inconvenience to what is already a rather challenging game. Just staying alive is hard enough, with respawning enemies making your life miserable. The graphics are beautiful, and fit very well together. The only criticism I have is that the starry skies are inconsistent to the other graphics. The gameplay is fun and enjoyable. Mostly good stuff, although I feel that once your player gets injured, he/she is not given enough time to recollect and regain control before being injured again. The game is clearly themed around Christmas, with the great music added, this is definitely a good entrant. But a great entrant? That's a debatable one, in my book.
ASSAULT ANDY:
Amazing storyline. Quite engaging.
Nice intro, felt like an old SNES game such as Megaman.
Mostly consistent graphics but your background parallax images didn't fit. You shouldn't have used that starscape or that auora. A pixel drawn one would have been better and fitted the rest of the game.
The shading on your graphics needs some work.
But the sheer volume of content in the game makes up for a lot of this.
Advance text button should be same as shoot/jump instead of enter. Pressing enter requires you to move your hand to press it and it breaks the game flow a lot. It's unnatural.
Nice parallax with lots of layers, but background needs to be different as mentioned before.
Needs a pause (nothing happens when I press escape).
Super polished. Good example of the general tips I gave above. Tells you what to do at each point, has that last 10% of polish (eg. The way the character comes in at the start of the level), no glitches that I could find (Full programming marks here, because there is a lot of content and it all works well.)
Gets pretty hard pretty quick. (Climbing that wall then having to shoot the enemy climbing it at the same time)
Wasn't sure how to break that capsule for the key the first time I found it. Really got stuck there.
The walljump is a bit iffy, I don't like how you have to 'attach' to a wall before you can jump off it. I think it would better if there was no delay between sliding on a wall and being able to push off.
Wasn't clear how to change different weapons in the second level. The up key wasn't obvious.
Levels a bit too long and tedious at times.
Probably should mention that your game was awesome.
