... to fill the arcade itch. Played flawlessly on linux Pop! OS 20.04 with GTX 1050 Ti and i5 9400F. Completed a normal story playthrough, played a couple of hours of arcade mode with my friend. Huntdown is basically a perfect modern take on arcade style game. Gameplay-wise, it is deep enough to let you alternate between careful, sneaky progression and agressive gunplay. Fights against bosses plays a big part in the game. They're just challenging enough to be rewarding in normal mode. The graphics are easily the best 2D pixel-art game played in a while. Recommended!
As the title says, my main gripe with the game is its lack of 4:3 screen ratio mode, as I immediately felt unease when dealing with ennemies and traps coming from the top and bottom of the screen. At some point, I couldn't avoid fire spitting traps although I knew exactly where they were because of how cramped the field of view is. Besides that, if you're looking for a true arcade challenge, you will get your share of chicken for sure! The pixel art is really pleasant, runs really well on modest setup, and comes with Linux support too. We can't rebind controls thought.
The game keeps crashing, whether upon leaving the tutorial to the first level or saving my progression. This is by far the poorest state of a game I've ever played at release. Version played: 1.0.3 on Windows 10.
I would have liked to be properly informed of the state of the game before purchasing it. As of the 6th of April 2021, here is what you have to deal with when playing the game for five minutes. First, it's impossible to bind the Z key to move camera up because it is locked for some other action, so AZERTY keyboards have no luck. Then, you can't play past the tutorial over the second turn, as the game won't let you take aim at the monster as the tutorial asks for. I ran the game for five effin minutes!
I'm three hours in. In order to progress, I have to add a newly unlocked Zombie Titan puppet into my party. The game won't allow me to. Therefore, I cannot progress any further. Avoid buying this game at all cost.
The basics of the game is there, the pace is good, there is just some fine tuning needed to make the game balanced in a fair way. I think the evade rating should be bumped up between 30% to 40%. By the middle of the ring, evading opponents is too risky, while taking damage from ranged attacks and other threats at the same time.
The twenty hours it took me to complete the game were perfectly paced. The game flows nicely, you're never stuck on your progression as the main objectives are split among the different floors. The puzzles are simple in their mechanics, but complex in their execution, often requiring a perfect timing. The real time combat takes some skill to master, is never punishing, and you're never short of opportunities to break a group of ennemies with doors to thin them out. I would have appreciated the possibility to re-alocate my hard-earned circuits (your levels in the game) to try different builds during my game.
Now that the developper finally pushed an update to prevent the game from crashing, I was finally able to complete the the game. There's things this game is doing fine: it's beautiful, artsy, it plays smoothly, the sailing is very good. However, it is impossible to overlook the way the game is poorly designed, as if concepts were randomly laid out and stiched together to produce something around an engaging shell. For example, the choice of the designer to go for rogue-lite elements like permadeath. This works when you can achieve runs in around one or two hours at most, eventually allowing the player to skip levels as it progresses throught the game. A run in Windbound can last several hours or more, depending on what you want to achieve. Under these circumstances, making the player lose everything it crafted or collected is unbearable. Again, combat against bigger foes becomes heavily punishing and way too risky for the reward. As it stands, the developper needs to engage in a deep redesign of the game fundamentals before it can be deemed recommendable.
