★Witchworks★

The indie game maker contest brings about all kinds and of games of all kinds of genre. One of this year's games "Witchworks" is one of the later entries, made in only three days.
Considering this, the mere completion of the game is a huge accomplishment. It being a really nice game even more so. While it lacks polishing, the basis is very solid and plays very well.

"Witchworks" is a cute, basic shooter. No story, no dialogue, just three stages to go through + tutorial. It can be beaten in less than 10 minutes if you do without fail, otherwise you will start again at the first stage.

The battles revolve around the dodging, using your different shooting options (1 basic attack + 3 magic-burning additives) to their full effect in order to cross safely through dozens of monsters filling your screen with evil, glowing shooting power. And earning XXXXXk points while you're at it.

Now to the mechanics of this game .. they are basic, but slight twists do give the game an original touch.
You set off with set lives, which you can replenish only with a huge amount of points (or so it seems). Your health regenerates slowly as time passes, magic is charged up as you hit and defeat enemies, and there is also an ubercharge using a completely filled magicbar (making you lethally vulnerable just as well).
Your magic upgrades (using up magic, duh.) are big explosive shots, homing shots and the more-direction shots given some extra-special cute name. Because everyone knows the names of attacks are always more important than the ones of main characters.
There are also passive upgrades you can select prior to any stage, giving you extra mobility/power/hp/magic recovery or the ability to collect extra points at the cost of your health.

What makes this game rather tricky is that the sprite of your witch is simply oversized, your hitbox (which you can highlight with shift) is just as small as a single shot. Not so your witch. As it is more or less a pain to always hold shift, you quickly get used to dodging despite this size-problem. In fact, it does add to the game to have less visibility of your immediate surroundings.
Furthermore, your gem is shooting stuff, not your witch herself. This makes navigation a little bit trickier than it already is.

The stages themselves are rather solid, I quite liked the library. They are also gradually getting more difficult. So are the difficulty options, which work fairly well. The diffculty is not brutal, but you can make yourself more vulnerable if you want to (score upgrade).
The basis is all there, real solid shooting. A happy, cute witch shooting off at anything that moves. The music is solid as well, sounds are as good as they need be.

Polishing, of course, is what this game lacks.
There are very few balancing issues, such as explosive being way too overpowered against normal enemies (as they trigger more attacks when they destroy an enemy). That is especially apparant in the library which relies on many squishy books and bookworms.
Everything aside from battle is made "in a rush" - heaven knows why that might be. There is an overly cute tutorial, and other than that nothing. The credits roll with a stage in the background and won't shut your game off, you can't cancel your decisions before you start off, so I often had to restart the game in order to choose a difficulty other than easy. And so on.

However, a shooter does not rely even remotly as heavily on characters, story, connections or even atmosphere as other genres (which isn't to say they cannot benefit from any of that), so the core of the game is very well there and the game in itself remains fun to play.
Certainly worth a play!