Universal Combo Queen (by Tap My Game)

Game is a lot of fun. I'm really getting the hang of it. But for the love of God. How do you kill the gold monsters? Is this a joke? I parryed one 33 times before he rekt me.

 

After reading the Dev messages about difficulty, I can honestly say I'm happy with where this is going!

With my two previous issues aside, I'm glad there is a distinct vision for Combo Queen. There definitely seems to be a lot of love for the work, and upon playing, the mechanics are actually rather interesting.

For those of you put off by the difficulty, don't be. While the tutorial at the beginning seems a little brutal, once you get past that, there is a window with which the game gives you an easier start (once you begin levelling). Enemies take one hit at first, then require more on top of each level you earn. The more you go up, the tougher they get.
Keep using the dummies to practice the hits.

I'm still pretty crap at this game (having played it only on my commute to work) but I plan on investing a lot more time into it.
Plus the pixel art is too effing amazing to pass up on!

 

I am in the top 25% on GameCenter last time I checked and I am getting wrecked to much for this to be fun. There are a couple of problems with the game-play formula.

1.) I agree with constant progression and challenge. Anyone worried about the difficulty in this game - its the biggest selling point to me at the moment. But what I disagree with about it, is that even if you suck at the game and constantly die after killing and enemy or two - you progress and level up. Then what happens? The enemies get stronger / add to their attack patterns. There is no way to go back and learn how to fight them at an easier pace. So you die even more and they continue to get harder. Before you have had a chance to grasp the basic concepts, you are thrust into harder ones that will cause you to die faster and progress more.

Yes there is a training dummy, but just like the tutorial, the precision is off from the normal fighting in the game. I can nail 9 - 12 hit combos while fighting now, but that training dummy and tutorial I struggle to get a 3 hit in.

2.) Which brings up the second point. The enemies get harder but there is no indication for what they will do. So I pick the game up now and there is a chance that I will get a med size great sword wielding tart to start off with that attacks me for 1 - 8 times in a row. There is no indication that it is going to happen. But that is OK, because you can take a hit and realize they are going to attack more... but then when they attack again, there is still no indication for how many it is going to hit.

I would be fine with this mechanic if it weren't for the random pacing of those attacks. They are not always at the same speed. And there is no penalty for over hitting the parry button. So it pretty much boils combat down to figuring out what pacing the game is going at, hitting parry till the enemy stops.

When you actually do get into a groove and kill a few enemies, it is awesome and almost hypnotic game-play... then one of these random situations comes in and frustrates the crap out of you. I am not learning from this randomness and if there was something to learn, I am not getting a chance to improve without the enemies getting harder. There is also the issue of - it went from killing and enemy in 3 hits to 30 and I get practically the same amount of gems. Another issue I would be fine with if the game wasn't so hard and I was learning. So yes, I would love a way to go back and beat the enemies and learn without having the reinstall the app.

 

I'm usually a fan of pixel art but these screenshots make my eyes bleed.

 

^ play it, it's beautiful. though it is pretty hard.. queen dies so randomly sometimes I die from one hit sometimes 2 eh it's weird but fun once you get into the rhythm

 

Thank you! Not everyone is going to like it.

Version 1.0.1 just fixes a critical bug that I found. Luckily got it in before actual release.

If you have 33 parries on the Golden Grunt (smaller one) you're actually close to parrying his full attack. Let's just say he's a delicate monster when defending.

Thank you for the kind words! Make sure to revisit the training dummy every day to get your daily reward of gems!

 

I don't know if you noticed but the enemies are actually telling you what they're going to do. All the enemies have set rules that they follow. Yes, the attacks are random but they are giving you visual cues on what's going to happen. Did you notice how steam is coming out from the top of their heads? That's telling you something. There are more visual cues for different monsters that tell you what they're going to do that I hope players can figure out what they mean.

As for having a way to go back and beat the enemies from before, I will take this one into consideration as I think it might be good. Thank you so much for your feedback.

I will be adding a hit counter for Queen in the next update so you can keep track of how many hits you have left. But as for how many times she can get hit, that's not random. Queen can always take one hit before taking a 2nd hit and dying. If you use a protection potion that will add one. If you equip the Deathwatch tomahawks you can add another hit. With all that, Queen will be able to take up to 3 hits before dying on the 4th hit.

 

Oh really thanks and its me from Twitter if you remember the suspense is killing me! and any chance for iCloud save? I have to play 2 separate games on my iPad and iPhone and it's hard I would like to be able to pick up where I left off from my device. thanks for the masterpiece. hope it does well on the charts!

 

Man this is hard! Getting better but it seems a bit on the brutal side. :1

Would it be possible to add more audio queues for attacks and wind up? Right now it's all visuals and muscle memory for me. It would be cool if there was a bit of audio to cue is in for reactions as well (grunts, sound of gears for the golem before they strike, etc)

 

I tend to think i'm pretty good at games in general, even rhythm type games. The game's graphics rock, the style rocks, but jesus -- had the time I play i can't even get past the first enemy. I think there just is not enough cues as to what the right timing is and the timing window may be just a bit too small.

I want to play and love the game, but either i'm getting to old or this is just too damn difficult.

 

Reading through this thread, it seems you (Devs) dropped your initial idea of a 2-finger or way worse, a "tap the screen with 3-fingers" control scheme. I remember that from the upcoming thread. That was my reason to not back you up on Kickstarter. All i want to read from you (Devs) that there is no such in this game, and i'll be happy to support you now with my buy.

 

My game seems broken, it takes me to a training dummy and I can't hit it.

If I quit or close the app and restart, it's back to the training dummy.

 

That happened to me to, although you can "kill" the dummy eventually, and then afterwards it won't make fighting it mandatory at the beginning. You CAN hit the dummy, it's just that there is something significantly different with the timing for the dummy and the rest of the game.

Anyway, I have the same beef that some others have had. I'd imagine I would be on track to getting good at the timing for the challenge the game presents at the onset, but every time you level, the enemies not only get more health, they mix up their repertoire slightly. It seem that the attack gains are entirely a tease because they are dwarfed by the increased power of the enemies.

 

I have to agree with you,it seems no matter what I do I can't hit or block the first enemy,I must have tried it at least 50 times today.and coming from a musical background I would assume My hands are pretty well coordinated but I'm either getting old or the response time for the actions seems short

 

I actually just got through it.

I replayed the tutorial from the options menu and after that, I was able to hit the dummy just fine.

 

The training dummy just lulls you into a false sense of security. The first few levels after the training make you feel like a badass. I leveled up twice yesterday. Restart the game after a while and it becomes impossible. XD

I tried again last night and this morning and I can't get past the first enemy.

Coming from a rythym game perspective the target is pretty unforgiving.

 

I'm in the same boat as a bunch of others in this thread.

I was able to grind my way up to level 10 and bought the next level tomahawks and combo book, but the enemies have leveled up to the point that the game is basically impossible.

I can usually get to a hit streak of around 10 -15, and can usually parry consistently in the 5-6 range, but even that ends up MAYBE getting past the first enemy but usually not even that far. And since I've reached level 10 (or got the second tier of combos, if that's the driving factor), the hit points on the enemies are so high that I barely make a dent even with high attack counts. It makes progression more an act of frustration than it being an achievement. I don't want the game to get easy, mind you, but it shouldn't get so hard that there is no enjoyment in the game anymore.

I really want to pull off insane combos and have the combat evolve (the enemies now interrupt my attack streaks with their own attacks), but with the enemies going from zero to sixty in terms of hit points and the hit window being crazy tight, I feel like I'm about ready to give up. I played 15 runs this morning and only made it past the first enemy 5 times and never past the second enemy.

So I don't know if I have any concrete suggestions, but I do feel like underlying the frustration is a crazy awesome game that I could play for many months to come. I actually created an account here at Touch Arcade to comment here because I love that the dev is looking at this thread and is listening to the actual gamers and I'm hoping that with some minor tweaks and updates the game could become my go-to app.

 

I completely missed the Kickstarter on this and discovered it last night. As many games as I have on my phone, I was tempted to wait for a sale, but the art and lack of IAP got me to pull the trigger. Great job, dev! It's refreshing to play a game that demands actual skill, though as others have said, the game can be dang hard and unforgiving That said, I wanted to share my experience and offer some possible suggestions.

Here's my experiences thus far. The tutorial does a pretty good job of teaching the game mechanics. It seems like the enemies scale with your level? The enemies are getting tougher way faster than I'm getting better at the game, resulting in runs where I die at the first enemy encounter. Getting killed anywhere from the first to third enemy means it takes a while to save up enough gems for much of anything, so I was pretty excited to finally upgrade my weapon. Being able to take an extra hit is nice, but the extra damage (1.2x vs the default 1.1x) is completely mitigated by the enemies outclassing my abilities. Now, I can tell I'm slowly getting better at the game, and as I said before, it's nice to play a game that's actually challenging. It just feels like the various upgrades will take forever to earn at the rate I'm going, and by the time I get them, will they even help?

My first suggestion is to increase the challenge during levels 1 and 2. As soon as the tutorial ends, Queen is one-shotting enemies with ease. That doesn't help the player learn the game. It would be nice if enemies took at least two hits to go down, so you're actually getting some combo practice.

There are two popular ways to manage leveling in RPG's: scale the enemies with the player's level, or steadily introduce tougher enemies as the player progresses. This game seems to use the former approach, but I think it may be more beneficial to try the latter? Let me feel like a combo-wielding badass when I get a new weapon, plowing through the early enemies until I get to the tougher guys that require said weapon to stay competitive. This would also extend the 'brick wall,' letting the player see more of the game and fight more enemies before dying, providing more practice and gems.

Alternatively, maybe the enemy skill progression needs to be toned back a bit? Part of the problem is that no matter how much I'm sucking, I'm slowly accruing experience. Before I know it, I've leveled up, and the enemies I'm already dying against are replaced by even tougher enemies that take more hits to go down and dish out more damage. Of course this is what you eventually want, to keep the game challenging, but it's a bit discouraging at the very beginning.

Please don't read this as anything but constructive criticism! I'm going to get back to it as soon as I hit the submit button. I think you've got a gem on your hands that has the potential to really shine