I'll try to be done by August 10th, 2016.
lol
let's stop trying to predict completion dates from now on
Unrelated to Cave Story, but still similar, Bionicobot's third mod is extremely short: Around five minutes of gameplay, two challenge maps and one boss. It is hard to form an opinion in such conditions, but let's judge what I can.
Assets
The mod presents itself with lots of original graphics, new songs, and a custom-made boss fight. Their quality is above average, and I especially like the new critter sprite.
However, the player character's sprite is a bit underwhelming. It's very tiny, and I don't feel like it fits the original Cave Story's graphic style, which this mod is still very similar to.
The customized intro and title screens (and title screen music) are a nice touch, as always.
I also really liked the boss music.
While not groundbreaking, these edits are on the right track; they look and sound pleasant but not overwhelming.
Score: 5.5/10
Story
Cold Core follows the story of some guy getting throw in some sort of facility by what seems like an alien, who then seals the entrance. This is a very vague premise, and some background might have been appreciated. However, the mod seems far from complete. I am confident that such plot elements will come in due time.
That said, I feel that the mystery in both the premise and the events (basically, the intro before the title screen and the encounter with the person (?) using the loudspeaker) is not romanticized enough; adding something (a dialogue in the shadows, more logs, etc) to cultivate the player's curiosity about the identity of the alien (?) or the facility guardian (?) might serve the mod.
There isn't much content in terms of story in this mod. What is there is too vague to be of importance. Developing that aspect further in the following areas of the game would be appreciated.
Score: 4/10
Game design
There is barely anything new in terms of game design in this mod. The only part that plays differently is the boss fight, but I will talk about it in "Difficulty and balance". Hence, I will not rate this category.
As a side-note, the 60FPS hack has been applied to the mod, which makes it feel a bit faster than usual. I'd consider this a good thing, as the game becomes more responsive and less floaty that way (not to mention faster-paced).
Level design
The second challenge map contains lots of paths that are blocked off by force fields. Computers are standing behind the fields, allowing the player to deactivate them, thus opening a backtracking path.
This is good design indeed, although the lack of automatic saving forces the player to manually backtrack everytime in order to use the save point at the beginning of the level if they want the way to stay open after they die.
Related: there is a bonus health capsule somewhere inside the map. It cannot be opened without a key, which is dropped by the last critter of the map. Conveniently, there is a force field close to that critter, but alas, the health capsule is far away from that return path, forcing the player to explore a significant part of the map a second time in order to obtain it. Putting the health capsule closer to that force field would have been excellent.
Also, I can't go back up
here without hurting myself.
I would understand preventing the character from going back, it's a design choice that may or may not be a good decision. I also understand putting a spike there if you're supposed to be able to come back up. But this is a situation where you can come back whenever you want, BUT you have to lose health to do so, without any justification.
Of course, it's not like you need to be able to go back, and later on you get to open a return path that allows you to backtrack. Still, this is a weird design choice.
Score:
7/10
This is a very easy mod, although this is understable since only the first maps are implemented for now.
My experience playing the original Cave Story betrayed me, as bats deal more damage and are harder to kill than critters in this game. Nonetheless, I was faced with no real challenge, and reached the boss in a breeze.
The boss fight contains interesting ideas: there are three enemies, which are floating and aiming at the player, and the fight becomes harder the more bosses die, as the area becomes filled with generated mooks, until all bosses are killed. The problem is that a clever player will think of killing all bosses at the same time in order to avoid dealing with the mooks, as the bosses are very slow, predictable and easy to dodge.
Now, the rest of the mod isn't really that much harder than the boss; but what I expected would be a slight rise in difficulty turned out to be a downgrade instead, which is too bad given that this was the end of the mod.
Score: 4/10
Misc
My friend the softlock is here and stronger than ever. It's also VERY easy to find (I actually did it by mistake on my first playthrough): if you use the door when the green missiles attack you at the beginning of the game, the person behind the loudspeakers will not act again, and won't remove the force field that prevents the player from advancing. Worse, the player can save in that state, forcing them to restart the game from the beginning.
There are lots, LOTS of typos, repeating words, grammar mistakes, and the like.
Thanking yourself (in the readme) is kind of in bad taste, you should use the term "credits" instead, that's what it's for.
No version number, anywhere. You should consider adding one. It would help you, beta-testers, and players.
A Config.dat is included in the download, for no reason.
The error.log file shows an error upon starting (Cold Core\data\Loading.bmp,0) which might be related to the following point(s).
I have seen screenshots of the "official" third version. Mine does not have any facepics, and the background does not have those shiny yellow lights everywhere (as you may already have seen in the screenshot earlier). I'm not sure what's happening.
Maybe related: sometimes the inventory menu glitches out by quickly blinking.
Conclusion
This extremely short but technically savvy mod shows appreciable level design and boss fight made from scratch. The storytelling is lacking, and there isn't really any challenge, but both of those points could change in the upcoming rest of the mod.
There isn't nearly enough content to be satisfied with this mod; however, I would like to see what Bionicobot could do on a larger-scale project. All in all, very mixed feelings.
Overall score: 5/10
