Nightfall

uuuughhhh this was a frustrating one...

This game looked kinda promising at first.  The visual style is one that yells words like "hardcore" and "metal" without sounding pretentious like so many games do, the title is just kind of universally awesome no matter how ashamed you are that you like it, and it just presented itself really well...until I started playing it.

Overall, this just doesn't feel like a game made by game design students.  I always get frustrated when I explain the DigiPen game gallery to people and they say "oh, like Newgrounds or Addictinggames, right?"  Because this list should be, and I think is for the most part, fundamentally different.  People on Newgrounds throw together a cool little project they made in flash in their spare time based only on the knowledge they gained from playing similar titles.  DigiPen students, I hope, are taught what elements in those titles makes the games good, and then how to integrate those factors into their own project.  Nightfall feels like a Newgrounds game.  Here's why...

First problem: the menu screen.  I would think that somewhere in the lesson on how to design a menu screen, the phrase "the menu is really just the first tutorial" would have come up, because it's true.  If your menu requires you to use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, the game is telling you that the arrow keys will be an integral function of the game.  Nightfall's menu uses only the mouse, but the mouse is completely useless in the actual game.  This is a minor complaint, but it reflects the thoughtlessness of the game's design as a whole, and trust me, it gets way more prevalent as you play.

As usual, I decided to forego the tutorial in favor of jumping right into the action, or at least trying to.  I swear, the loading time on this game is like something out of Sonic '06.  Anyway, when I finally got playing, I used my platformer intuition to run to the left and press space to jump over a crack in the ground.  Oops, I fell through the crack.  Yep, this is another one of those "up-arrow is the only jump function" deals.  That must mean the spacebar does something else important, right?  Oh wait, no, it's utterly useless.

The attacks are preposterously unbalanced.  you use "A" for a smash, "S" for a slash and "D" for an anti-air flurry, but there is literally no reason to ever use the latter two.  Smash may as well be the only attack.  It wrecks anything near you, including stone walls that can only be destroyed with smash, so the game is basically telling you through its design that one attack is intrinsically better than the others.  There's no penalty for spamming smash either.

It was only through alt+tabbing out of this game's window to chat with my girlfriend that I discovered that you can use super moves.  I was typing something when all of a sudden my character let out a really cool, stylized spirit demon type thing that wrecked everything in sight.  I then had to retype that sentence to myself so I could figure out which button made the magic happen, and I discovered it was "C."  No, yeah, that's fine, I don't know of any other prominent buttons that weren't in use that you could've used instead, oh except maybe the SPACEBAR OR LEFT CLICK.

Oh and you know what the best part is?  You want to know what really made me want to ragequit when I was only about 20 seconds into this mess?  It's the classic James Rolfe lament...one life, no continues, no save feature.  Beat the game in one go or you're done for.  I appreciate that this game is going for the "hardcore" appeal, so such a mechanic might actually make sense, but that doesn't stop the fact that I can't see half of the game because an enemy keeps glitching me out of existence.

This game is finnicky, poorly designed and overall dysfunctional.  Play it only if you want something to rage about.

Links
Night Balls: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24361