Endorlight Review (shinmai - 2frunk2duck)
UPDATE: Well, things make a lot more sense now. It's a classic asset-flip, yay! Wan't to recreate Endorlight? Well, all you need is GameMaker and this
Platformer Roguelike Engine asset from YoYo Games' marketplace for $33.99 ONLY $16.99. Now all you need to do is doodle over the default sprites and recolor the tiles a bit and you're done!
Original review follows:
tl;dr:
Do you recommend this game?
No:
it's unoriginal, even taking into account the early stage of development
there are a lot of issues, that not "early development" issues, but rather just plain lazy things (all graphics look blurry due to using the wrong texture filter, etc.)
it's someone's first attempt at a game in Game Maker, and while there's nothing wrong with Game Maker, the inexperience shows clearly
the developer feels shady (deleting discussion threads, recommending their game on their curator account, moderating the forums under a different steam profile etc.)
some features reported in Greenlight all the way back in November are still missing from the game.
If you feel the game looks promising, instead of buying it now, follow the game and see where it goes once it develops, but I'd definitely recommend against buying at this stage.
Actual review
Endorlight is a dungeon platformer that's clearly heavily inspired by Spelunky. Your goal is to navigate short levels from the top to the bottom, find an exit and procede to the next randomly generated level. There are enemies, spikes and pick-ups on the way, and beyond what you'd expect from any platformer game you have wall-hugging, wall jumping, a horizontal ranged weapon and two different melee weapons. There are three tilesets fro the game, the third of which is used for every level beyond level 3, and five or six enemies, most differing only in their appearence, speed and hitpoints.
The game is in early alpha, but even taking that into account, the concepts the game presents feel unoriginal, and the game has a bunch of issues, that result from laziness or incompetence with the engine (Game Maker) including a very wonky control configuration system, blurry look due to using the wrong type of scaling filter on the sprites and tiles and UI issues (item's drawing over oneanother etc.)
The game is also VERY easy. There are way too many health pick-ups littered throughout the levels and the enemies are too easy to dodge most of the time. I usually give new games a change of one game over or one hour if there are a lot of deaths, in the one hour that I played Endorlight, I made it to level 159 or something, had so many health-upgrades that they covered my gold total, and finally died because I started playing one-handed while playing Trivia Crack on my phone. The game feels less like an alpha or pre-alpha, and more like an "engine test", but given that it's using Game Maker, I'd say the engine has already been quite thoroughly tested. I'd say the biggest challenge the game provides stems solely from the controls feeling laggy (not floaty, I actually enjoy some inertia in my platformer controls, but actually laggy) and the various small glitches (there are two shoot buttons, both fire where the character is facing, except if your standing next to a wall, in which case the character fires away from the wall).
The game is in early development, but in my playthrough, I never once encountered many of the features advertised on the games Greenlight page way back in November including the Digger enemy, the knife weapon or any inventory.
Outside the game, Endorlight has been Recommended by four curators, one of which has more than 10 subscribers. That one being Vantom's Giveaways, whose admin - vantom - is the user who submitted Endorlight to Steam Greenlight. The recommendation doesn't do anything to disclose this. Make of that what you will.
The developer also seems to delete discussion threads without any explanation or reason. They are using a wonderful PSD template from Designercow's awesome 80's Style Text Mockups pack, available on Envato's graphicriver store. I pointed out that they've made a small mistake when customizing the mockup, forgetting to move the glow/flare "blobs" to overlay on the logo's stroke outline, resulting in a weird look. The thread was summarily removed without explanation.
So, in closing. If this game interests you, I'd recommend checking out the free Game Maker version of Spelunky instead, it has a similar aesthetic, but offers much more to discover and is a very polished game. If nothing but Endorlight will do, unless you're a personal friend of the developer, I'd hold off on buying until at least the features that were supposedly already implemented during the Greenlight phase are realized...
Video demonstrating some of the menu issues, and a few gameplay clips to illustrate the monotony of the gameplay.