Magno-Warrior by TheLastBanana
A top-down shoot-'em-up where your only weapons are the enemies themselves.
Controls are WASD to move, and mouse to rotate your ship.
When an enemy runs out of health, it becomes "deactivated". This allows you to attach it to your ship by touching it. When it is attached to your ship, it will begin firing again, harming enemies instead of you!
If all of the ships attached to yours are destroyed, leaving you defenseless, you can ram your ship into an active enemy ship. It will cost you one life point, but it will attach to you.
There are 3 types of enemies:
Fighter (mid-sized) - these are the most common. It takes 3 hits to deactivate it, and it fires projectiles at an average rate. Once attached to your ship, it can be destroyed in one shot.
Cruiser (wide) - these, less common than Fighters, are slightly faster and take 4 hits before they deactivate. Their rate of fire is slower, but their width provides greater cover while attached, and they take 2 shots to destroy once attached to you.
Needle (thin) - as common as Cruisers, Needles are the fastest ship, both in movement speed and rate of fire. However, they also take only one hit to destroy, both when attached to your ship and when active. Because of their small side, they provide limited cover when attached. However, their constant barrage of bullets makes up for it.
Controls are WASD to move, and mouse to rotate your ship.
When an enemy runs out of health, it becomes "deactivated". This allows you to attach it to your ship by touching it. When it is attached to your ship, it will begin firing again, harming enemies instead of you!
If all of the ships attached to yours are destroyed, leaving you defenseless, you can ram your ship into an active enemy ship. It will cost you one life point, but it will attach to you.
There are 3 types of enemies:
Fighter (mid-sized) - these are the most common. It takes 3 hits to deactivate it, and it fires projectiles at an average rate. Once attached to your ship, it can be destroyed in one shot.
Cruiser (wide) - these, less common than Fighters, are slightly faster and take 4 hits before they deactivate. Their rate of fire is slower, but their width provides greater cover while attached, and they take 2 shots to destroy once attached to you.
Needle (thin) - as common as Cruisers, Needles are the fastest ship, both in movement speed and rate of fire. However, they also take only one hit to destroy, both when attached to your ship and when active. Because of their small side, they provide limited cover when attached. However, their constant barrage of bullets makes up for it.
Ratings
| Coolness | 18% | 35 |
| Overall | 3.00 | 66 |
| Audio | 3.24 | 17 |
| Community | 2.81 | 82 |
| Fun | 2.62 | 98 |
| Graphics | 2.62 | 106 |
| Humor | 1.62 | 127 |
| Innovation | 3.19 | 61 |
| Theme | 4.00 | 15 |
My biggest problem was aiming! When I pick up the first deactivated ship and it starts shooting it feels great, but it's like it really doesn't want to shoot its friends. I can't really couldn't understand how/why the weapon rotated around the ship. It might become easier when you pick up more enemies, but it's way too hard to kill the first one.
However, the fact that enemies attached only certain unoccupied spots, and only in the direction you are currently facing, made this game almost unplayable for me. It would be easier to understand what's going on if the attached enemies "auto arranged" themselves. I know that gives up part of the gameplay freedom, but I think it's a willing sacrifice in order to get the aiming issues sorted out.
Not sure what I can add, other than to say it was a very fun entry! I probably would have enjoyed it more if the guns were easier to control. Perhaps it doesn't need to mouse control at all, or maybe you could get rid of the keyboard control and make the ship follow the mouse pointer. That way it might be more obvious where the player is facing.
A very nice entry, and I love the music. Well done! :D
My idea for aiming/picking up dead enemies is this: Auto-arrange the dead enemies, and make the center-most one point at the mouse. That way there will always be a shot going directly where the mouse is.
Overall, you have a solid, well-made game. Thanks for taking the time to comment on my entry. :-)
Great: You've got music, you've got a highscore list, didn't found a bug! ;-)
The enemies take far too many shots to kill considering the slow rate of fire. Annoyingly they seem to take only one shot to kill once they're attached to your ship.
I liked that you could attach to enemies without shooting them first, but it seemed inconsistent when that was allowed and when not.
In the end I found it was easier to not bother attacking and just play the game as an avoid-em-up, but that wasn't fun.
I liked the music. I also liked the graphical style.