Thoughts on Super Meele

First of all, thanks to the devs for getting this build out to us so early. I appreciate the consistent effort you all have had to keep us in the loop. 

 

I just went through and played with all the ships on Super Meele for a bit and wanted to give some first impressions. Overall, I was surprised how similar it was to the original combat system since there had been a pretty lively discussion here about how much the game would diverge in that area. I don't think keeping things similar is bad--if it's not broke, right?---though I hope that more depth and variation is added into the system later. Maybe the crafting mechanic will help with that. 

 

Also, combat, as it is now, is fun. It's simple, intuitive, has good feedback (for most things), and I could see the combat working well on touch devices as well as a keyboard and mouse. While this may seem like trivial feedback, I thought you all should know that what you've put together is working so far, at least for me. 

 

Onto some specifics:

 

PRO 

• I like the designs of most of the ships, especially the little animation details put into them. They are all visually distinct in the melee, though not as much in the selection screen, and several of them show a lot of personality
• The opening music (the 3DO "Hyperspace" remix) is quite good. More like this!
• I was able to figure out how most of the ships worked very quickly. A few took a little bit longer to get, especially the Trandals ship, which still confuses me a little bit
• The AI seems to be pretty good. I'll have to get gud at melee before I can say for sure, but even on the lowest difficulty I didn't win every battle
• Several of the ships have very creative mechanics. Launching drones from the Tywom, shooting gravity wells with the Dan'Nath, calling in extra ships with the Menk-Mack, and only moving in straight lines with the Measured all stood out to me as fun and different mechanics
• The feedback from getting hit is good, both the "recoil" on the ship and the red showing up on the crew bar
• The audio design is also good in that the different abilities all sounded distinct

 

CONS

• While I like the ship designs, the textures used seem a little flat. Probably because this is in beta
• The actual battle music was a little bland for me, as were the victory ditties. Also, during the ditty you lose all control over your ship, which was annoying, even though I can see why having both ships be stationary would be desirable. 
• Having some indication of how much batt an ability will use, or how quickly you recharge batt, would be helpful. 
• Many of the ships felt pretty much the same as far as speed and maneuverability. The Shryve ship is slow, the Drenkend and Menk-Mack ships are low-acceleration, and the Measured and Trandals move strangely, but other than that the ships all felt like they were in the same ballpark. I feel like having more variation, especially with turning rate, would help differentiate the ships. 
• The overall design seems to be weighted toward doing lots of damage. I didn't see as many weapons which would chip away at enemy health (think the Supox, Spathi, and similar ships) but most ships had high damage-output weapons. Maybe this "glass cannon" design is intentional, but I personally felt that the damage output for a lot of the weapons was too high
• Several ships don't have any ability to shoot down incoming projectiles. This seemed like an odd choice to me, since intercepting enemy fire was a big part of the old combat system. 
• The screen hugs really tightly around the two ships. I would prefer it to scroll out a bit
• The planets don't seem to have much of a gravity well. I wanted a bit more weight with them
• Also, this is a matter of personal taste, but I really dislike how the planets look from space. Probably nothing to be done about it at this point, but I wish the art design had been different there

 

A lot of these points are nit-picky, and I didn't talk about bugs at all here, but I hope this feedback is still helpful.

 

Keep up the good work!