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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / The particle effects do this game a disservice

« on: October 01, 2011, 10:34:00 AM »

I'm really loving AVWW so far, and it's gotten noticeably more fun in just a week. But I have to say that the particle effects in this game nearly ruin the whole package for me. I thought it was just Fireball and sniper shots at first (since the two are practically identical), but the more I play the more I realize that anything shooting a particle effect just acts as annoyance. The visual effects themselves are nebulous, making it difficult to gauge the actual hit boxes of projectiles. There are also a lot of cases where multiple projectiles are spaced too closely together, which wouldn't be an issue if my character were small and agile, but this is not the case. Now, many of the games I played in my younger years were platformers, and in my later years I've played a lot of bullet hell and shoot 'em up games. AVWW has elements of both in its sidescrolling segments, but the problem here is a combination of 1) the player characters are too big and slow to adequately dodge the projectiles, and 2) the aforementioned issues with the particle effects being too big, scattered, and nebulous, plus they're oftentimes too close for my big and slow character to squeeze past while jumping. I honestly think the game would be a lot more fun if all of the projectiles were replaced with plain squares or circles. It wouldn't be pretty but at least I'd be able to know where a projectile begins and ends.

I'd like to hear other people's experiences with this aspect of the game because it's starting to deter me from actually playing.