Recent reviews by TheSyldat

A fast paced roguelite, if you liked Rogue Legacy games but you needed them to be speedier and snappier Scourge Bringer might be for you.

Really good versus puzzle game like puzzle bobble or magical drop

Pick up and play !

Real quick to have fun with it.

Several years in and I not only not regret my purchase but can't wait now to see if Valve will one day provide a refresh of its design.

Seriously people really need to give it a try .

Well that sure is a game that's gonna scratch an itch long forgotten about by the industry at large.

Well has the industry ever considered this type of game with a great deal of respect to begin with ? That's a question for another day.

Polynomail 2 might be only at the start of its existence and its adventure, but straight from the start we can see ourselves linking it to a long legacy of games made to get you "into the zone" .

If just like me you've cherished games such as Jeff Minter's Tempest 2000 , Space Girafe, Gridrunner Revolution, or hell Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez or Child of Eden or outside of the shooting game genre his feverfull Lumines series , The two Playstation 1 game oddities that were Internal Section and Vib Ribbon (a game that is still better experienced on its original hardware by the way) . Then if I tell you that Polynomial 2 is apparently setting itself for the very same kind of experience then you know what I am talking about.

A Nighamare of an exercise in balancing everything right to slowly but surely get every player in that very specific and soothing state of auto-hypnosis. A specific state of mind which once you're done playing, leaves you not even remembering, what kind of steam you needed to blow off before starting the game. You just know that through getting to that specific kind of zone you just feel better and relaxed. This kind of balance is not easy to strike. And to put it in place every ingredient needs to be correctly balanced and not overpower the rest of the mix.

If on top of that just like Vib Ribbon and Internal Section you add to the mix, the possibility for the player to have a part of the games visual feedback influenced by playing his/her own music within the game, then as the game designer you're not just in nightmare fuel territory, you're just setting yourself for a long amount of back and forth of being whipped in the face by a lack of balance coming from this simple possibilty.

Given that the devs of Polynomial 2 were masochistic enough to go down that path, you bet that said balance will take a while to be established. Which is why they desperately need your feedback and your care and love for the project. One can also imagine that yours truly will not be the only one in the ballpark of suggesting that even how the waves of ennemies are structured could be influenced by your playlist in the long run within at least its "survival mode"

User interface wise I still got some pet peeves and the game needs a lot of work yes, but the sole fact that for the first time I am provided a full six axis of freedom within a "trippy shooter" is worth the gamble in my own opinion.

As far as I am concerned during Early Acces I will continue to give them feedback on what needs improvement. As for you fellow gamers let me leave you with this nugget :

If you love Jeff Minter's Work
Thorsten Kuphadlt's reimagination of Tempest 2000 called Typhoon 2001
Mizuguchi's Rez, Child of Eden

Then you know why those game are all too few but most importantly all too overlooked despite the game design nightmare of a challenge they represent for their creators. You are also almost certainly aware of the growing pains they all commonly share, and how much investors console manufacturers and editors simply "don't get it". You know that trippy shooters are to video game design, what launching yourself in the filming of a horror movie are to movie production. That is to say almost certainly setting yourself on the path of "growing pains and developpement hell".

So if anything give it a go and give the devs some feedback so that we would have a title so balanced that everyone will be able through this game to experience that soothing state of consciousness that washes away your worries while making you perfom insane scoring and MAD MOVES through MAD SKILL ^^

Sincerely a fellow "zone addict" gamer

PS : by the way giving feedback on what needs to be improved should not prevent you from being kind to the devs, after all like I already stressed the genre in which they dip their toes is already in and off itself a generator of bewilderment from the "powers that be" let's not add a toxic player base to the pile okay ? :)