Playtesting

My feedback for the gameplay, covering everything ranging from menus to gameplay and balancing.

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as game was about to be released, there were far fewer questions than usual and a focus on bugs/balancing.

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Questions:

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Game experience:

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Please rate your overall experience from 1-10:

8/10

would you recommend this game to a friend?

X   Yes

     No

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Would you consider buying or playing this game again?

     Yes

     No

X   Maybe

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Feedback:

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Did you come across any bugs in the game?

Yes

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Please provide as much detail as you can to describe the bug:

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damaging your teamates with the poison bomb bottle:

apparently I was damaging my teamate by throwing the poison bomb bottle (upgraded from the base fire bottle bomb), although the poison bomb bottle was not damaging myself.
- this was based off a comment from someone I went into a run with during the test. 

process:
start a game with at least one other person in the game
level up and unlock your poison bomb bottle 
throw the poison at the other person (it may need enemies around to trigger?)

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Please share your final thoughts and feedback on THIS test:

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starting with the first impressions,  menus etc:

intro/menu video:
I like this. it really sets the scene and shows off the cool locations for the player to end up in. nothing else of note with this

Menu:
the menu options I tried all worked fine, the menu was mostly scaled well and it was easy to understand what was where in the menu.

some suggestions:
social menu:
it would be nice to see a list of active friends list players, currently playing the game, not just a list of steam friends (seems both online and offline) - also doesn't make sense to have the offline friends visible too.

"key bindings" menu:
would be nice to have smaller text here (its slightly bigger than the main menu text already.) I think having smaller text will make it easier to find/navigate to the right keys, especially when you are scrolling quite a bit such as in this menu.

General gameplay feedback:

general difficulty/ gameplay balancing comments:
I found the difficulty very tough. especially notable things were:

1. the cost of upgrading weapons - I found alongside having to open doors, the cost of weapon upgrades, especially the t2 one (never managed higher) felt too expensive (I'd probably drop it to 10k as it would allow you to upgrade a 2nd weapon as well). this would also make the general gameplay slightly easier

2. Door prices - these seemed quite good. they were affordable and made sense as you progressed deeper in.

3. upgrades - as with the door prices, the costs for these make sense. Expecting to spend 1-1.5k on an upgrade/perk felt appropriate.

4. life refresh costs - I am torn on these. as with the weapon upgrades, they are very expensive, although in this instance, you only have to worry about them if you are dying & then you are being punished by not being able to upgrade to better gear so you are losing out twice as much. Personally I think these should stay at this price, but reduce the weapon upgrade costs slightly.

5. enemy waves, health etc - I found myself dying around wave 16-19. the main problem was getting overwhelmed and trapped in a corner. (the grenade & special ability helped a lot escaping these).
for enemy health, this felt balanced when I was able to upgrade my weapon but with a level 0 weapon, you would get overwhelmed very easily. Enemy numbers were mostly ok but I think they scaled up slightly too high from ~wave 13 ish onwards, although this may be more notable as I was only able to upgrade a weapon to tier 2 at wave 17 ish

Weapons notes:
of the weapons I used (AK, both shotguns, revolver, hunting rifle and the SMG (forgotten its name) I quite enjoyed most of the gunplay here. 
The shotguns and revolver felt powerful and satisfying to use. especially colateral headshots with the revolver, although the revolver quickly felt weak without an upgrade.
the shotguns felt quite powerful throughout the early - mid waves (1-10 ish), I rerally enjoyed chaining the 2 shot shotgun with the aoe reload damage buff.

The AK, SMG and hunting rifle felt quite weak, especially the hunting rifle. 
hunting rifle: I found it didn't feel satisfying to shoot. it felt underpowered & I was expecting a similar feel to the revolver as you can shoot faster with the revolver and it seems to be more effective overall.
AK: even from the second area, this felt underpowered and not very satisfying to use compared to the other weapons in the arsenal.
SMG: this may be becuase i was only ever picking it up later on but it felt quite weak and unsatisfying to use (similar to the AK)

missions:
I didn't manage to note the names of some of the cylinder so I'll refer to them by their main tool used

hero cylinder: most of this felt quite fun, although getting the fire enemy to shoot at the furnace was quite inconsistent and sometimes took a while to pull off

lightning cylinder (scarecrows + tesla gun):
This mission was a mix of fun and unnecessarily frustrating parts:
1: the banshees were fine to deal with. triangulating the audio made it doable.
2: shooting the scarecrows just got frustrating as every time you spend 2-3 waves trying to find that last scarecrow hidden by the grass
3: shooting the cages was fine, although it would be nice to be able to destroy them in one clip, not needing a single shot from the 2nd reload (11 shots total)
4: charging the tesla was ok - nothing to shout about but it felt like forever when you were under attack.

Purple lantern/ library cylinder: 
I found most of this mission quite confusing. It was clear where to find the lantern but it wasn't obvious what order the icons in the cypher went.
I did find all the cypher symbols, but I believe it was complete luck to actually getting the cypher in the correct order.

the final cylinder (apparently to do with the lamb or something)
I never reached this one. I don't even know where I would have to go for it, although looking at the lamb room, i guess it is something to do with the symbols on the cage & something else there?

Graphics, art, visuals etc:
It all looks lovely. I didn't notice any visual bugs, glitches etc.
one thing to note was heavy frame drops (from a steady 60-70 down to 20-30) when there were lots of particles and enemies around.
also I found it getting laggy when shooting & it made shooting, aiming etc difficult to do.

in summary:

main menu: very nice - slightly smaller text on the key bindings for ease of searching?

general difficulty:
slightly too hard - I think making weapons cheaper to upgrade should fix this
missions were mixed, some quite confusing, other parts frustrating (scarecrows + lighting furnace) but the rest was good and made sense.

weapons - shotguns + revolver felt great to use, AK, SMG + Hunting Rifle felt underpowered in comparison

Graphics - looks great but gets very laggy in combat

overall though, I quite enjoyed the game + gameplay and although its not my personal preference of game, I can tell why someone who enjoys the zombie horde, horror etc style genres would enjoy this sort of game 
Just as I noted, it would be nice for it to be slightly easier to upgrade weapons & some slight buffs to some of the weapons & less lag and I think it would be great fun to play. especially with a group of friends on discord or something.

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