This game was pretty fun. It's definitely a good pass time.

"it was perfect. perfect. everything, down to the last minute details."

the art is so coooooool

Hey, this is a pretty decent SHMUP...but I gotta admit that I'm a bit underwhelmed! Maybe I'm holding it up to too high a standard considering the team who made it, or maybe I'm not being fair considering the jam restrictions, but I was kinda let down.

Don't get me wrong, as I still think it's a nice game. It has an overall high-quality and polished feel to its overall construction, what with its charming visuals and animations for not just gameplay, but for the menus and other elements as well. There are a lot of levels and bosses to chew on, and the chess theme is played around with in amusing ways, such as the options which shoot in manners related to their piece.

But as I played, certain elements just kept getting in the way:

*Overall the game just feels rather dull to me, first and foremost from how slow and ineffectual your bullets are: I can understand wanting to start out weak, but it just feels bad to me and even the upgrades don't fix this weak feeling. But more importantly than that, it's from how levels are filled with tons of dead air from the incredibly low enemy density. Couple this with other facts like that the bosses are spongy and repetitive with not enough patterns to keep them entertaining, there aren't any special mechanics for the players to set it apart, and so on, and I found it hard to want to keep playing despite how cool the game seemed.

*Some enemies and bosses have weird and unclear invincibility phases that awkwardly extend combat engagements in boring ways, like how the flowers in the forest levels can't be hurt when they are opened up for some strange reason.

*It's rather bizarre that there is no life system, but even if you accept that, it's so inconvenient that the death screen takes so long and boots you all the way out instead of giving you the option to restart or spawn at checkpoint immediately.

*There are some weird graphical oddities here and there, such as how the background scrolls faster than the foreground, leading to a parallax effect that's the complete opposite of how it should be. There are foreground elements like statues which look like you'd collide with but don't, and others that you do, leading to confusion.

*I really wish I could preview what the upgrades even do, so I know whether I want to use my points to purchase them. For example, I regret purchasing the knight upgrade once I realized the weird way it shoots missiles.

*Speaking of the upgrade system, there is a weird glitch you can do where you purchase an upgrade but then hit the 'X' button instead of the 'Check' button to close the menu: you'll keep the upgrade but it will refund your credits like as if you cancelled it! Why does the upgrade menu even have a distinction between cancel and confirm, especially if it doesn't work?

To sum it up, the game's OK, but I don't think it's good enough that I'd want to buy a shirt of it, no matter how much it keeps insisting! Good attempt nonetheless.

WOO! game is FANTASIC!