Good game, but what's with the options menu?
Reviews for "Crystals And Monsters"
very good game, i was confused on what to do at first but when i found out how everything works it was cool and fun, my only complaint is there's no tutorial on what to do, and i don't mean a in-your-face tutorial, it'd be cool if there was a optional tutorial that explained what to do when you're placing towers and using gold bc it's hard to notice the upgrade towers button. can't wait for more!
Tower defense games are my favorite kind of game and its nice to see people making new ones still. this one does have some issues but it has a lot of promise too. ill be doing a full report for you after playing for several hours.
ill start with the pros.
1. the game is fun. i know that may seem odd to say but i think its important to say that upfront.
2. the game (for the most part) does what you are trying to make it do. after just 2 waves of building towers i figured out how it worked and was able to reach wave 30 on my first try. i was quite happy about that.
3. it has a good concept. i know it borrows heavily from gemcraft which is my favorite tower defense game. it works well for this.
4. the art design is decent. the menu works fine, and the game ran smoothly all the way through when i played it.
im going to say quite a few cons now, please understand this is meant to be a critique to help you work on it in the future. the game isn't finished so it has a lot of rough. hopefully what im about to say helps.
cons.
1. the music does not turn off, i ended up muting the tab.
2. the UI was buggy while playing. sometimes the enemies when clicked on would not show their info, sometimes it would say other info unrelated to them such as "fuse towers" and other random phrases on the side instead of their stats.
3. flying enemies spawning randomly though the walls makes sense, but caught me by surprise especially on the 3rd wave. it makes it very hard to defend against due to them having such a random verticle spawning range. if you dont start immediately to put 1 tower that can reach everywhere vertically you run the risk of them flying right by. RNG that strong that early is frustrating.
4. the towers are awkward to place after a while, you have to constantly delete rocks to place new towers on when it would be much more intuitive to be able to place directly over a rock when putting down towers. at the very least make it possible while holding another button to prevent misclicks
5. the abilities of towers are not clear or balanced. the red AOE tower makes sense, but the tower with the speed effect? i still dont know what it actually does. poison towers seem comparatively weak to all the others because it deals so little damage per hit and its poison does not stack nearly enough to catch up. the reason poison worked so well in gemcraft is because of swarm monsters and monsters with armor since it bypassed it.
6. there is no tutorial whatsoever about how any of the tower stuff works. i understand it a bit because i messed with it for several hours but it is not intuitive. two of the same crystal types with the same crystal level can be -fused- to make the next tier, yeah thats fine, but i got a JADE tower and i still have no idea how special fusions work. it seems to be poison and aquamarine? but i had 2 poison towers of the same type with 1 aquamarine, did it take all 3 or just those two? im playing around with it now and i thought i did the same fusion but with 2 aquamarines and 1 poison tower i got malachite? and i can upgrade the special fusions but nothing else? and it doesnt tell me how much it costs to upgrade. and why did malachite get the ability from the yellow gem when i didnt use one in the fusion? or did i? the effects are VERY unclear. i also got a silver gem and im not sure which ones are going to fuse when i click the button because 3 different gems had the special fusion when i did it.
7. a lot of the times an enemy got through my maze was because i didnt have control of what i was doing. i needed a tower that dealt ground damage but got a lot of air stuff, i needed an anti-air thing but only got ground towers. stuff like that. i know i need to build more from the start to make sure there arent holes in my defense but RNG in that way was frustrating when i knew what i had to do but couldnt do it.
8. the only damage indicators seem to be when the ground tower hits with a critical. id like more visual identifiers for enemy health so i can tell where they are taking the most damage to work around my towers better. also id like to have -some- control when im watching the waves go through. lots of times i just tab out during a wave because its boring to watch...speaking of...
9. something weird happens when im tabbed out. enemies do not act right but im not sure whats happening.
10. your kickstarter page has a lot of typos on it. not really a criticism of the game, but it is something to look into.
ok lets move off that format to clarify a few things.
i love tower defense games, and yours is enjoyable. i played it all the way to wave 30 four times. and i did a lot of quick restarts to play around with the tower mechanics. heck im playing it RIGHT NOW without ever upgrading the "upgrade chance" thing. only using chipped towers and whatever i can fuse them from and im up to wave 17. (wave 18 now) its a unique experience that i am enjoying.
if you fix the problems with this it can be an absolute gem (pun intended). i suggest hiring someone to help you with marketing as your kickstarted said, so you can work full time on the game and get the success you deserve from it.
you need some UI improvements, some tweaking on gem balance, and a lot of tooltip fixing, as well as making the enemis more unique. right now there are 2 types of enemies as far as i can tell and theres no real uniqueness to them. just generic ground and generic flying.
i dont know how unique the maps are going to be since i can only access the easy one, but im curious to see what you do with the rest, as well as how you get more replayability out of this. right now it has a very similar feeling each time i play it. im mostly playing it to test it over and over which adds to the fun for me, but i dont think others will have the same desire. its same-y to play a map more than once.
the upgrades feel very permanent and over powered, its nice but makes the game significantly easier and takes away from the challenge on the first level. they are also very generic without saying what they even do. how much stronger does it make my towers? how much faster? how much more gold do i get?
i just beat that level i was playing while writing this. never upgraded that "upgrade chance" thing. beat wave 30 with a massive amount of money in reserve. the game is not balanced, its fun but requires more work. i do have 2 upgrades, which was tower strength and an extra tower every round which helped, but if i can completely ignore one of the main mechanics while playing something is wrong.
if you want a full time beta tester id be happy to help, (my discord is Potatomaster#2412) i think there's a lot of issues already that need addressing, i've been messing around with this thing and this review just a small thing that i did for fun, but i know how important this can be for you so hopefully it helped.
take care!
Fun. If I have four turrets per turn, though, I get an odd shooting effect at a place where there is no turret.
antebios responds:
thanks for your report
could use a tutorial, but other than that its ok.