Great job with character designs and animations! Player controls felt pretty tight too.
1. How is the partner command/combat, is it too complicated, frustrating (especially the partner), or controls don't make sense?
I struggled to find utility in micromanaging the companion character, e.g. why would I ever leave them behind, what’s the use case for it? Why would I turn their fighting stance off? Using left/right formation seemed worse than no formation where they could respond to threats from both sides.
Other than that, they occasionally did not want to face the enemy and instead shot their gun in the wrong direction when I triggered it manually.
2. It was definitely a bare bones "tutorial", but was it good enough to understand the gameplay? Or did you need more onboarding/more specific tutorials, if you even would be interested in learning more?
For the current state of the project I think it’s fine, what mattered to me is that I could start playing pretty quickly. Note for the future: I think that most games like this start with 2, sometimes 3 moves and introduce more over time. Here I needed to learn 3 character attacks, strong attack modifiers + 2 companion attacks, it was a bit too much.
3. Did it feel like a unique system that you wanted to get better at and figure out, or did it feel like just a basic action game with a gimmick?
It was unique in terms of ‘I never played anything like this’ but I did not feel hooked by it or compelled to master it.
4. And straight to the point with this, would you rather just have a entirely self-controlled AI for the partner instead of commanding them like this?
I think I’d prefer a companion to be more capable on their own, not someone I needed to micromanage. What could work for me in terms of direct control:
- picking a target for them to lock into or move to, e.g. with the right analog (but they still fight on their own once they finish my order)
- triggering their special abilities manually IF they synergised more with the player, e.g. companion can stun a difficult enemy for me to finish off
- companion abilities could have cooldowns to force me to be more strategic, not spam them all the time
- if companion and player character where more asymmetric - they are able to do something that I can’t
But these are just my random ideas, I give no warranty they would actually work ;)