Just finished the demo, very short but I had a good time! Here are my extended thoughts for your review and consideration:
PROS
- Loved the visuals, the rendering and animations especially, perfect, wouldnt change a thing!
- The UI brought me RIGHT BACK to the original trilogy.
- Controls were very nice! They were responsive and fluid and I never felt like I was misjudging my movement.
- Good level of challenge and exploration for finding the collectables.
- It was good enough that I was compelled to 100% complete it!
CONS
- Movement is slow, the level design compensates for it somewhat but even in the time it took me to 100% the demo I found myself asking things to hurry up. I'd highlight this as my main issue with the demo.
- Camera is a little bit awkward, I think it's left up to the user too much to decide on the direction of it, maybe have a camera that follows, tracks, and turns rather than just follows? For example, like in mario 64. when you run to the right the camera turns to face you instead of just moving without rotation, it's confusing to get your head around at first but implementation isn't too hard in Unity if you just study examples like I gave you, especially with the skiollset you clearly have. Also, I frequently found myself pressing up to turn the camera up when I wanted it to go the opposite direction, which is somewhat of an accessibility issue for people who prefer inversion of the camera.
- I doubt this will be an issue in the final release, but I didn't have to use the rev roll at all in the demo outside of the intro (which was very nice btw), it would have only lead me to get hurt or lost.
WHAT I'D LIKE TO SEE NEXT
- A faster way to move that isn't something as chaotic as the rev roll, be it increasing the move speed or just adding run functionality. I understand this is a departure from the original trilogy, but I think evolving the formula organically would only do good, though you do have to be careful not to stray too far.
- Individual X and Y axis invert options for the camera (unless I just missed them, in which case my apologies)
CONCLUSION
Overall, a very short but good demo! It shows a lot of promise and is made by clearly very competent developers, it felt good to play but is just missing a few key things to make it a real great. I was surprised to see how well you captured the rendering of the original games but with a fresh, modern take.
7.5/10