Are there any difficulty adjustment settings? Thinking of getting this on the Switch so the kids can play too.
Unfortunately, no. I wish we’d had more time to add those kinds of options! However, the game is not punishing of failure, so you can try battles many times and bring different strategies to bear.
This looks really cool. Looking forward to grabbing it once it’s more widely available.
Makes sense, thanks. Went ahead and picked it up on Switch, and looking forward to trying it out.
Our beautiful soundtrack by Big Giant Circles (Jimmy Hinson of Threes, Mass Effect, Just Shapes & Beats, etc, etc) is now on Bandcamp!
WARNING: Track titles could be spoilers if you’re sensitive to them!
Thank you for the warning, will check it out once I’m thoroughly done with the game (not in a hurry though!)
Finally got a chance to play, and this is so damned delightful!
Played the first dozen-odd battles and it’s delightful so far. Just unlocked the second weapon type, and can already see how different loadouts will give a lot of great variety.
Definitely noticed framerate struggles on the bigger beasts, so hopefully that patch gets approved soon.
One little touch that I really appreciate is not automatically defaulting to a male protagonist and leaving gender indeterminate. My younger daughter’s first question when looking at a game is always “can I play a girl?” so I was happy to see Skipper being referred to with “they/them”".
I loved that Skipper is so “blank state”. I dont know if there is narrative for it, but it’s very much appreciated and well done to have a sort of “talking silent protagonist”. Usually they are just bland, but I tend to put emotions into this little rodent. Probably because of the very good art.
My personal favourite is the 3rd weapon so far, maybe because it speaks to my masochistic self!
I have played quite a bit more, and I appreciate more and more as I am playing it.
Not only is it charming in its slightest details (which I won’t spoil, noticing them is so endearing!), but the challenge has been upscaling in a way that reminds me of the Braingoodgames games (sic).
The more I am familiar with the game, the more the stakes are elevated, and the more I am thinking every single moves.
I do not know where it will stop but this one has been steadily on its way at the top of my games of the year.
I was going to pick this up anyway but your words have made me all the more excited to play it! I now own it on Epic and I’m looking forward to playing some later.
I’m really enjoying this so far! It’s early doors for me but I can feel all kinds of systems slowly starting to spin up and it’s exciting. One little detail that I like, and it’s something that reminds me of the shops in the Splatoon games, is the way that the hearth, kitchen, smithy and cellar have variations on the same theme so it changes as you switch from one to the other. The music also seems to develop as you discover new companions–I love stuff like that!
I also like that you guys didn’t just flip the artwork for Granny when she’s talking on the other side of the screen! :-) And finally, the fonts are just so pleasing to my graphic designer eyes. My system is a potato but because Beast Breaker isn’t a graphically intensive game, it renders at 4K (the only game which can run like this for me) which makes everything so crisp and sharp–that’s also a treat!
I’ve just found Dandy and I’m toying with the different gear/essence combos against different beasts.
I noticed that the tooltip for the shield/block on the health bar gets covered by the health tooltip:
At the point I am at, I found a build that is definitely broken (with so many variations, it’s somewhat bound to happen, and I bet there are many others), but I’m just skipping it maintain that fun tension of the game.
How do you mean “broken”? If you’re saying it wins against everything without fail, is it possible you just haven’t encountered whatever game mechanic might counter it? Or do you really think you’ve broken the game?
-Tom
EDIT: Also, I regret getting this for the Switch. The slowdown is really noticeable, and it’s a buzz-kill for what should be exciting moments. Hopefully, this gets fixed in an update, but if that’s the case, why was it submitted in this state in the first place? :(
It very well could be I haven’t yet met its counter, but there is a mathematical aspect to it which leads me to believe some very careful balancing might be needed.
I’ll blur the details.
It is a very specific hammer head skill, the one that costs 10 energy points and let you move accross the whole screen inflicting regularly AoE damage, while piercing and ignoring almost everything along your path.
The problem is the low energy cost: with the armor giving back 20 energy on a specific scale, the combination makes it possible to spam intertia level 5, AOE 6 damage without interruption, negating the inertia tradeoff that is the balancing act of the powerful hammer skills. The AoE nature of the damage makes it possible to move around the whole screen almost unhindered (the strongest beast I have met is, I would say, the shark, which is very vulnerable to it despite having a heavily defended core).
I am guessing raising the energy cost of the skill by a single point might be enough to temperate this sort of abuse, although it would look quite unnatural compared to the cost of any other skills. And the enery potions would still make it highly exploitable for many turns.
Sorry for the terrible typing and formatting, I’ll blame my tablet!
On the developer’s discord, a performance patch has been mentioned since the day of release, but Nintendo has yet to push it apparently.
Happy to report that the 1.0.2 patch for Beast Breaker is out for Switch (and already released on PC/Mac)! Besides a number of bug fixes, it includes optimizations that should greatly improve performance in battles.
Thanks for being patient! We are a small team, and optimizations to our core physics systems require careful consideration and a lot of testing to make sure we don’t fundamentally change the way the bouncing combat works! When we recognized the slowdown on Switch in certain circumstances, we started working on the problem, but we had to make some hard decisions about release and patch timing. We’ve done our best to get this patch to players ASAP!
(BTW, if you want to track progress on any other issues you might have seen, you can go here.)
Hoo boy, I’ll say! Excellent work! The difference pre- and post-patch is immediately noticeable. I’m so glad you guys got it resolved. This kind of physics-based block-breaker relies on the joy of watching everything in motion after you’ve dialed in your attack; without that motion component working smoothly on the Switch, it was a bummer to lose some of the payoff. But now I’m flinging quiverfuls of arrows at a time with aplomb! /swoon
-Tom
Heeeey! Glad it’s working for you, Tom! Hopefully it’ll be a nice surprise for @Left_Empty when their day starts, too.
Thanks to everyone who has given the game a try! If you like it, please spread the word!
Enjoying this even with the performance issues. Well done on getting a patch out so quickly after launch!