Terrian Saga: KR-17 Review

Terrian Saga: KR-17

Game was fairly enjoyable from a speedrunner's perspective in the short game. This game is probably more enjoyable if you grew up playing more Sega Master Drive/Genesis games than if you played Super Nintendo games (which I grew up with), and it's probably more enjoyable as well if you play IWBTG games and Meat Boy-style games, since many of the bosses seem geared towards that.

STAGES: I loved the design of the stages, allowing a dash mechanic and how some of them had some skips that were exploitable to be completed. Some of them did have some bugs where you didn't have to complete every objective though in order to pass them. I may revisit and try to exploit these whenever I choose to revisit this game. Some of the stages drove me nuts, especially one of the final stages with the jetpack. I wish there were some stages that built up to the mechanics of the jetpack that would have allowed for more practice, but it's not a big deal. Excellent stage design.

BOSSES: Some of the bosses were okay. I did not enjoy the fact that the dash mechanic was disabled, although I understood some reasoning behind it. There was one level in particular (the dinosaur boss) where, after I defeated it, there were still some objectives to complete, but the dash mechanic was still disabled. It was extremely inconvenient. It became rote memorization, akin to Meat Boy/IWBTG bosses (thanks for infinite lives). I soon discovered that most of the bosses, including the final boss, was dodge until death, with no way to speed up the boss at all (essentially an autoscrolling boss). The only thing I appreciated here is that there was little variation in randomness to screw up potential speedruns, but these bosses tend to take a very long time (particularly the final boss).

BUGS:
* For a 1.x version in my playthrough, there were noticeable bugs. For example, when I would complete a zone, the leaderboards would have me listed in my friends at the very top in 3rd place.
* Another bug that became extremely annoying for myself as well as my viewers was that about 2 or 3 music tracks overlapped towards the end. See http://www.twitch.tv/doicm/c/4800112?t=1h44m15s for reference.
* Some timers would overlap from one zone to the next, messing up leaderboards between zones. See http://www.twitch.tv/doicm/c/4800112?t=26m20s and the transition for reference.

SUGGESTIONS:
* For the tutorial at the beginning of the game, if possible, when explaining the controls, have the accompanying key associated with an action shown to the player. I had no idea what the "USE" button was. For some reason, when I saw setting my controls at first, the "USE" button wasn't even an option to set in the main menu.
* Fix the bugs.

CLOSING: Great game built towards speedrunners, especially those who like playing Genesis/Master Drive and IWBTG/Meat Boy. It took me over 6 hours to complete it in a blind playthrough, and I really wanted to thank you for the experience. It's not my normal kind of game, but I really appreciated it anyway. I do plan on doing work on this sometime, and I look forward to the fixes being made. If there's anything more I can do to help, please let me know. Also, if there's some kind of log file to send, let me know as well (because I couldn't find anything for it).