Played this (partially) live on stream on the 15th of April (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice).
Metal as all hell! There's a lot to love here, it's fast and hilarious and cruel and heavy. The soundtrack rips, the levels look phenomenal, the colours are perfect. Love the limited scope and the accessibility of everything - there's a set of levels and you can play through them for the score and the cred, but if you wanna just see them all, you can simply select each level from the menu. The character and enemy design is perfect, wouldn't change a single thing.
I have two main gripes that keep me from singing Penance's praises unconditionally - firstly, there doesn't seem to be a map view (which is probably intentional) and losing your bearings is frequent. If the corpses of enemies remained in place like they do in Doom this wouldn't matter, but a few of the levels require a lot of exploration to be able to parse fully and if you're not paying attention sometimes that can be troublesome.
Secondly, there isn't much grit when it comes to the feeling of everything, no feedback. Guns don't recoil, enemies have no weight, when you get hit you don't FEEL it. There's just a lot of fast-moving parts all flying around at once and none of it feels like I think it deserves to.
All of that said I really really like this, it's so much fun. It's a speedrunners DREAM, would love to see this at GDQ or something.
Metal as all hell! There's a lot to love here, it's fast and hilarious and cruel and heavy. The soundtrack rips, the levels look phenomenal, the colours are perfect. Love the limited scope and the accessibility of everything - there's a set of levels and you can play through them for the score and the cred, but if you wanna just see them all, you can simply select each level from the menu. The character and enemy design is perfect, wouldn't change a single thing.
I have two main gripes that keep me from singing Penance's praises unconditionally - firstly, there doesn't seem to be a map view (which is probably intentional) and losing your bearings is frequent. If the corpses of enemies remained in place like they do in Doom this wouldn't matter, but a few of the levels require a lot of exploration to be able to parse fully and if you're not paying attention sometimes that can be troublesome.
Secondly, there isn't much grit when it comes to the feeling of everything, no feedback. Guns don't recoil, enemies have no weight, when you get hit you don't FEEL it. There's just a lot of fast-moving parts all flying around at once and none of it feels like I think it deserves to.
All of that said I really really like this, it's so much fun. It's a speedrunners DREAM, would love to see this at GDQ or something.