Murder Drones Virtual Training

I'm copying and pasting this from reddit, where I've posted the same review. 

To begin this review, I'd like to highlight the parts that were phenomenal: The music, sound design, and sprite designs. 

The music was a beautiful 8-bit take on the MD theme, and I would absolutely listen to it for hours on end. 

The same goes for the sound and sprite designs. I loved every bit of the art in the game to pieces, especially your character and the supervisor.

As for the bad parts?

To begin with, there's a picture attached, composed of my final playtime. I started playing this at around 8:45 pm local time, ended up taking until *midnight* to finish. Full concentration, full devotion, no breaks to do anything else. Now, my mental state may have deteriorated as I desperately craved sleep, and my ability to play the game along with it, but I still believe this is... not an ideal playtime on normal mode.

There were 2 things that ended up padding out my death rate and my time. If anyone cares to know, they are as follows:

Difficulty wall #1: Final Boss.

There's not much to say here, outside that it's a skill issue on my part. It was cool, overall. Extra health made it difficult to fight, chainsaw hands are chainsaw hands, etc. etc. My main gripes are as follows: 

# Why do dives do 2 damage when it's damn near impossible to pull them off? The boss is consistently jumping, you can't damage the boss unless it's on the precisely the same y-level as your character, and if you do dive, you're liable to get ganked by the spikes that you lost track of, because everything's an instakill!

# Tracking orbs. Not much to say about this one besides 'ugh. These things.' I wish they disappeared earlier or faster, but you can't have everything 😁.

Overall deaths caused by boss: Approximately 640, from ~550 to 1100 deaths.

Difficulty wall #2: Escape level, redux. 

The final part of the game. Overall deaths caused by this level: Approximately 75, from ~1125 to 1208. This one's a doozy, because of what I feel comfortable calling a bullshit attempt at artificial difficulty. There's already a part that requires incredibly precise inputs way towards the beginning - any progress is locked behind your mastery of a very precise jump - but there's also a dead end that's locked behind a difficult series of jumps and worker k.o.s. You are quite literally forced to redo the end part of the level multiple times, due to an unlabeled dead end that is impossible to recognize as one, all if you take the wrong turn a single time. It took at least 50 deaths for me to finally learn why I was consistently dying at the entrance of the dead-end corridor (an inconveniently placed death block right behind a crowbar drone, hard to notice unless you're specifically looking for it [before you say skill issue, I was under a hard time crunch because of the nature of the level, still moderately pissed off from my ~500 deaths from the bossfight, and frustrated from all the deaths to the extremely difficult jump at the beginning of the level- not to mention that there was a Doll that I had to knock out to even reach the narrow corridor, adding to the need for speed].) That dead end should be removed entirely, imho. Words can't express the sheer and utter frustration and antipathy that consumed as I realized that what I had spent ~45 minutes on wasn't even the end objective. The real ending? An even longer sequence involving extremely precise parkour which was actually pretty fun, all things considered. I didn't have any really unfair deaths there, so there's not really any complaint from me about that, other than that I really wish there was a checkpoint after the dropper/jump part.

Random notes/thoughts on game mechanics:

Doll is incredibly annoying in the prom level. She's got nigh-on infinite sight, meaning knives appearing out of nowhere, necessitating incredible reflexes or a respawn. Flip a coin, that'll be the outcome whenever an offscreen Doll throws her knives. I eventually beat the level with what felt like an incredibly cheesy method, involving dashing past literally all the enemies just to arrive at the stage where they respawn, then doing the level in reverse. Not the most satisfying play, especially when doing the level left to right spawns a giant honkin' wall of Dolls that's impossible to get through. A simple reduction in view distance for Doll would work wonders for making the prom level far less annoying, especially given the fixed spawn location and instant respawns of Dolls.

It's cathartic to slaughter the mundane worker drones. I'd go so far as to say that this was the sole reason I was able to continue for so long. :D

Flight is a bit unintuitive, but overall fun. Takes a while to get used to, but thems the breaks.

Overall review: 

9/10, with everything considered. It's the kind of thing you'll love, assuming you like this kind of thing. Would probably recommend if you have an entire free day, nothing else to do, and enjoy platformers. Music was incredible, characters were fun, and as frustrating as it got, there were a few gems in the game that make it worth playing - there was one level devoted solely to killing Dolls, and it was so much fun. I've completely ignored the lore in this post, but hell, I'd say it's worth playing for the lore. A very fun game with (unfortunately) very little replayability for me. Just make sure you don't start playing it at night to relax after a long day at school. Empirical evidence suggests it's not the best at that. Congratulation is in order for the devs, who clearly slaved over the game and made an incredibly captivating experience. The passion and love put into the game absolutely shines through all the frustration it caused, and I'm all for it. All the devs should be commended: from their itch.io page where the game can be played, congratulations to Autopawn, Remi Mixer, Crjönch, Miszuk, and Marshimiiu.

I am aware of a hardmode, to which I respond: No. 

Great Game