Finally, I had time to test the update:
Here are my impressions of the game:
PROS
- I liked the overall improvements to the project, such as the animated title screen.
- The new sprites are really cool, especially the bosses like the girl with the chainsaw.
- There are some really cool ideas in the game - and to this day I find the enemy in the bumper cars hilarious.
- I really like the battle against the giant robot where an NPC immobilizes it from time to time, because he talks to the player and that adds immersion to the game.
- The screens at the beginning of the levels are really cool.
CONS
- There's something that, in my opinion, is holding the game back too much: the enemies being able to go off-screen. I know that games like SOR allowed this, but in that game you never throw the enemy as far as here. Because of this, many times you hit the enemy with an attack that makes him fly far away and you wait a few seconds for him to come back, which ends up ruining the flow of the game. I myself made this mistake in the Avengers project, and ended up changing it so that only the bosses do this (in some cases, not even them).
You can notice this in the first masked enemy - he's very slow and takes several seconds to return.
- There's a juggle problem in the game. I remember that in the previous version you could hit the chainsaw boss infinitely in the air if you managed to knock him down, and it was fixed, but it happens with the final boss. In the video, you'll see that I managed (with the help of Poison's helpers) to simply kill the last boss with a single sequence, which is very anticlimactic. Check the juggle cost of these characters and the juggle points of the boss.
- Some attacks seem to have a very short Z value, and they only hit if you are precisely aligned. Some examples I noticed are the shots from the playable version of "Striker" and the attack where Poison disappears from the screen to fall on the target.
- Speaking of Poison, the boss version has 2 points I wanted to comment on:
1 - Many times, he performs the disappearing attack to try and land on you. And, as soon as he hits the ground, he performs the attack where he jumps onto the table and calls for reinforcements. It's an interesting gimmick, but since both movements take quite a while, you spend a good amount of time just waiting for the boss.
I remember this was one of the harsh criticisms Rita's Rewind received - an excess of long gimmicks. Okay, in that game almost all the bosses have gimmicks, but it's worth shortening them, especially the landing on the enemy movement.
2 - The ninjas who are his allies (and who appear during the subway level) have a movement where they laugh and dodge. The problem is the overuse of this - there are points in the video where they did it repeatedly.
Overall, I do recommend the game, it's fun to play.