Well, I made a start on the Punkcake mega bundle and Ecstatic is magnificent. I chose it first because it was the least clicked on game listed! :) But, I mean, just look at it:
Délicieux indeed!
So you’ve got a carrot-on-a-stick cursor that your spider follows when you left click, then a mouse-over lock-on, right click fire-and-forget shooting system. It feels weird at first but there’s this tension and rhythm between mousing over to lock-on and mousing away to move. It’s amazing how smooth it feels when you’ve got the hang of it. What’s more: when you lock-on to several targets, your spider does a burst dash on release which feels very satisfying and counteracts the stationary time to do all the locking-on. That’s a really smart touch. The heart of the game is in the pick-up/levelling system though.
Each level will periodically spawn a randomised pick-up. There’s blast (missile blast radius), drill (expands arena and speeds up lock-ons), hsink (reduces cooldown between salvos), speed (spidey speed), build (rate at which you store missiles), fangs (bite enemies on collision), freez [sic] (time slows down when you stop—this makes the game feel turn-based when levelled) and store (how many missiles you can store). Getting the right balance is key so not enough store and you run out missiles. Not enough hsink and you’re waiting too long between salvos. Not enough speed and it’s harder to dodge. But, hey geggis, I thought you said they were randomised? Well you can lock-on to pick-ups to cycle them!
There are three levels, each with their own music and BPM (and an editor that you can bung your own music into but I’ve not looked at that), each with four difficulties (easy, normal, hard, ecstatic) and a bunch of challenges or achievements to do for each one. I’ve done each level on easy but it’s getting really tough on normal. I daren’t think what hard or ecstatic are like. Restarts are lightning fast and as such I’ve found it very difficult to stop playing. It’s so easy to just have another go…
If the other games in the bundle are anywhere near as good as this then I’m in for a treat.