A [[Third Person]] sci-fi rogue-lite shooter with melee available on [[Steam]] in demo form. # Asteros Review I have been playing a lot of Next Fest demos that I felt like weren't getting enough love. So far I've played the most of Asteros. I went through the tutorial and then played up until the boss fight with the girl who killed me and got to see the start of the next loop. I really want to see if there is anything beyond that point if I can kill the boss, but I also don't want to replay the mission with 4-ish prefab rooms/hallways and the same 3 janky enemies. First some things I liked: - I am in love with the auto-map, the way it fills out and looks is so cool, its like right out of a movie, I just really want a full-screen version that I can pan and rotate around - Player animations during combat look smooth - Lightsaber - The pistol feels pretty good, the yellow numbers to tell me when I was hitting harder was great to help motivate me to go for headshots - Quick swapping between melee and ranged as the attack key is pretty slick, although the aim/shield on the same button kept tripping me up - The character design with the full body armor and the back mount for the sword is very cool - I like the mobility options with the dash and double jump, I just wish I felt like there were more places to benefit from them - I played with both controller and mouse and keyboard and movement and combat were smooth with both - Real voice actors, I think even the placeholder enemy VO is charming - The Beksinski-esque tau cross cutscene, I just have a soft spot for his work, it's so distinctive and it is such a refreshing contrast to the scifi hallways There is *something* really interesting happening with Asteros that kept me playing through it the first time though. So I think you have some real potential here. But I'm going to go through all of the rough spots I encountered: - Tons of lip desync in every cutscene - Subtitles didn't work for me - Piles of enemies that I am actively shooting all saying "I think I heard something" at the same time - Enemy VO not always properly FXed, so the "I think I heard something" line just sounds like somebody talking in my ear and not like it's coming from a real character in a real space - NPC behavior is really rough: they can't pathfind around obstacles, getting stuck under stairs, their weird side-step to avoid damage sometimes puts them through walls, and they keep throwing grenades at themselves or at walls - I ended up luring a couple out at a time and often walking backwards shooting until they died and I feel like that's not the ideal way to play it but jumping into 50 enemies seems unwise - Enemies can start shooting I think before the doors even open? Their reaction times are amazing but their vision and hearing is terrible. Leads to a lot of unpleasant combat situations. - The heavy gunners seem to have very low HP, which is.. weird. Its nice in that it gets them from shooting you fast, but they appear bulky so it is jarring that they have no armor. - The giant hammer wielding boss felt kind of silly. Why does the commander have a comically oversized hammer that spits out bullethell orbs? Who knows. Are the bullethell and time loop aspects inspired by Returnal? - Third person camera clipping through walls making it impossible to see what is happening when doing melee/sprint - I feel like you're inspired by Severed Steel and Ghostrunner but the enemies are bullet sponges so fast-paced combat is not really on the table since while you are meleeing one enemy another can be shooting you, so you will take a lot of damage if you don't play it safe - I don't understand why dash has a stamina meter at all, especially one that is so slow to recharge, dashing is not so useful that it needs a nerf and no other systems engage with the stamina meter (that I noticed), so it should probably go - The artifacts feel out of place, like I assume this is a vertical slice so you wanted to introduce them as part of the demo, but they don't really make any sense to me, and some are in crates and some are given by the corpse shrine things? Very odd. I feel like those need to be differentiated. - The curse artifacts felt like a waste of space. The upsides never seemed remotely worth it for the downsides. So I never took them. If they were time-limited maybe it would encourage experimentation? - Also your website's cert is not properly configured, so it displays a warning and a lot of people won't get past it. This is, like, just my opinion and all. But are you sure this needs to be a roguelite? Like between when I found Asteros and started playing Asteros, I forgot. I assumed it was just temp blocking out a level for the demo. I've played a lot of rogue-likes and roguelites, this isn't a dig at the mechanism. But you have complex scifi assets and I think that randomly generated levels is actually *more* work with complex assets, since you not only have to create a bunch of pieces that can fit together, but you also have to make the system use them in interesting ways. And they end up looking same-y anyway because the brain is great at recognizing discrete structures. Sure, wave function collapse procedural generation can help with repetition, but you also have to define those rules. But when you make a map by hand you can do a lot more with less. You can reuse assets in creative ways at different angles and scales but its hard to trust an algorithm to do that on its own. But when trying to have the game generate the level, you end up needing to make a lot more parts for the algorithm to use in fewer ways. Simpler and/or more organic/open spaces work a lot better for 3D roguelites. You see this in Returnal, Deep Rock Galactic, Superhot, and many more. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it is a huge undertaking. Overall, the amount of time to complete one level (and saving seems to reset you to the beginning of the level??) makes it feel poorly suited to "permadeath" where you start all over from the beginning at level 1. Believe it or not, I enjoyed my time with Asteros. I hope you are able to continue developing it.