itch.io

The concept made sense enough to me.  The easy levels seemed to usually take me between 2 and 3 minutes; I did one medium level that took a little more than 15.

I like the simplicity and cleanliness of the interface.  A couple times I thought I wanted a sort of "negative" marker, to mark that I knew a block couldn't be a particular color, but that would probably over-complicate the interface too much.  

It was easy enough to see in the normal browser area:

When I tried "fullscreen" mode anyway, it didn't expand to fit the screen (in Firefox 140.13.0esr,  1600x900 display).  

When leaving fullscreen mode, it wound up clipped by the available space in the browser.

The indicators on the ships were visible enough, it was the bars in the HUD that I had a hard time watching.

Played through the easy, medium, and hard tutorials, and then a couple levels with the civilian fleet, on version 3.5.  I liked being able to configure the ships with different options, and choosing ships with different predispositions to start with (power vs speed, etc).  I also thought the styling and art were good.

I was playing on a laptop (and thus a smallish display with a little less brightness than typical desktop displays) in a brightly-lit area, would have appreciated a little more contrast.  I think the main menus were fine, but once I started the tutorial, things were harder to read.  My display was already set as bright as it would go; I didn't see options in-game for contrast adjustments in the settings menu, but something like that might have helped.

The easy tutorial let me choose different weapon types, but it wasn't clear to me what the tradeoffs of the different weapons were.  I went with the laser for this one, and it didn't feel especially effective; fortunately, the missiles helped with that.  The ship speed felt a bit slow, but I figured that might be a purposeful function of the large ship size as compared to my opponents.  It took me some time to get used to the "tank controls" (movement keys working with respect to the ship orientation rather than camera orientation); I know some players prefer the tank controls, but maybe there could be an option to choose between the two?

On the medium tutorial, I skipped placing the smaller ships.  I was unable to drag them out when the tutorial popup text explained about their positioning, and then the tutorial went right into outfitting the flagship after that.  Then it seemed like it was time to launch the flagship, so I did, with no smaller ships.  I still won, but it seemed like I missed part of what I was supposed to have done.  It felt like the projectile weapon had a more noticeable impact on enemy health than the laser did.

On the hard tutorial, for the first time, I tried ramming the enemy ships, to see if my superior size and and shielding would be another way to deal damage.  This time around I'd placed the allied ships, though, so even when I stopped shooting to try to see if ramming was doing anything, the allied ships were still firing, so I couldn't tell if I was actually doing any damage this way.

I had a hard time keeping an eye on the indicator bars (shields, energy, hull) while playing.  I was mostly focused on the ship and projectile movements, and without focusing on the bars instead, it was a little hard to see the levels.  I didn't really want to take my focus off the combat, though, so mostly I wound up ignoring those indicators.

I couldn't tell if there was a way to repair the hulls of existing ships at the shipyard, or whether permanent hull damage was intentionally part of the difficulty.  I've played games that handle it different ways, but the tutorial hadn't dealt with existing hull damage, so I was a bit surprised.

The civilian map I got at first had a shipyard after the first level, and I was a little surprised that I couldn't go back to the shipyard after the second level.  I'm in space, and I'd cleared out the enemies, so it didn't seem like there would be anything to stop me from going back.  I was even more surprised to find that when I left the civilian region and re-entered, the map changed, which meant I was able to just repeatedly leave and re-enter until I got a map with an available shipyard.  Maybe that's an intentional way to let players reset their level progress if they're low on resources?

- Does the aiming line feel clear and reliable?

It is definitely clear, and reliable for at least the first bounce.  I noticed a couple times, particularly near block corners, where the balls did not hit the second bounce I'd seen, though it is possible that the mouse moved ever so slightly as I released the button; since the angle changes rapidly near corners, that might have been enough to change the trajectory from what I saw when I started releasing the button.  I don't recall any surprises with bounces further from the corners.

- Do the levels feel fair as they go from easy to hard?

I stopped after 21; it seemed like a pretty reasonable ramp up to that point.

- Does the game feel good on both desktop and mobile browsers?

It seemed fast enough on desktop, but in fullscreen mode on a 1600x900 display, some elements (the damage powerup button, for example) were off-screen; leaving fullscreen mode allowed me to scroll down to it.

- Does the game become more satisfying as the ball count increases?

It seemed like the hit count for individual blocks in the levels kept increasing along with the increased number of balls, so it didn't seem like I was destroying more blocks or making faster progress.  Since more balls also take more time to animate, when I made a mistake, it took longer to correct.

- Is the UI flow understandable?

Yes

- Does anything feel confusing, slow, unnecessary, or missing?

In fullscreen mode, if I started aiming on one side (left or right) of the screen, and then moved to aim on the other side, the background became blue instead of green, and I wasn't sure why, so that was a little confusing.  I only saw this in fullscreen mode (browser is Firefox 140.12.0esr if that matters).

I wasn't sure what enabled the powershot; specifically, whether it was set for a particular turn in each level, or whether there was something I did to enable it.

It might be missing some variety in the powerups and/or block types.

Definitely agree that both "on & on" and "who am I" are easier than "Link", and thus might make more sense as an introductory level.

Some other notes, after trying the first level of each planet for a few minutes, and finishing some of the easier ones:

Having to press escape on every loss to see the mouse cursor slightly interrupts, and thus slows down, the action of trying again to learn from my mistakes.  It is more disruptive with the webgl build (at least in Firefox) since it also quit out of fullscreen mode at the same time.  If the cursor is hidden on purpose during the level, could it be un-hidden automatically on a loss, to speed that up?

Like Interrealm Games, I was surprised by the collision behavior.  In particular:

1) When I tried to "hug" side walls, I'd slide sideways through them and off the path, even though they looked to be solid.  If that's intended, that's fine, but some sort of visual indication of the solidity of the geometry would make it less surprising.

2) When I was really short on a jump, I could pass into seemingly solid blocks (especially on "Link" where the blocks of the path are very tall) and seemed to keep going, instead of triggering the loss right away.  This also slows down the action of retrying to learn from mistakes.  

3) In  "calling for you", the rotating paths would change from something I could travel on, to something I fell through, as they rotated.  If that's part of the level's intended difficulty, that's fine, but it would be more clear if the player slid along the angled surface of the path rather than dropping straight down through something that appears otherwise solid, and had been solid until that moment.

I didn't notice the button to choose other levels after selecting a planet at first.  Maybe larger or higher contrast navigation arrows would stand out more.

The levels that are primarily a single color (light gray, white, or near-black) in color don't always have a lot of contrast within them (except for the pink lethal objects).  Unless contrast and/or color perception are part of the intended difficulty, maybe tweaking the colors a bit, or else adding a "high contrast mode" setting would be helpful.

Once a world is chosen, I didn't see an option to go back to the world selection screen, only to choose a level for that world.  Maybe I just missed it, but it's nicer to have a back button there than to have to start a level and immediately fail it on purpose to go back.

Played until hitting ~47 billion.   Some thoughts:

The rival desk raid event, like other events, moves the UI elements when the event appears.  More than once, at the end of rapidly clicking, I clicked one more time than I'd needed to, but the end of the event meant that the UI elements move back into place, and I clicked the 2x profits button by mistake.  Some mechanism to prevent that kind of accidental mis-click would be nice.  Eventually I just started spending my money on more bots instead, so there'd be less money to lose, less clicking, and less risk of mis-clicking.

When not in fullscreen mode, the upgrades eventually flow out of the scrollable area (I was using Firefox 140.12.0esr, did not check in other browsers).  When I switched to fullscreen mode, that didn't fix it; without being able to scroll, things just flowed off the monitor.  I was running in a virtual machine that only had 1600x900 resolution; maybe that's less than the minimum supported resolution?  Otherwise, maybe a way to minimize or hide acquired upgrades would be helpful.

The ability to cancel events and stabilize the market--seemingly for free--makes it feel less like I'm running trading bots in the market, and more like I'm playing in "god mode" .  Maybe there's another way to get players to interact with negative events and market conditions, tying in the focus mechanic and different bot types?