I love the cyberpunk aesthetic and all the references were *excellent*! The game played very smoothly and I had no issue throughout my playthrough. Great job!

This was a beautiful presentation. I felt like the combat was a little lackluster but still somehow satisfying? I cant put my finger on it. I guess it was like "just keep clicking until you win." there wasn't a whole lot of depth to it. But it felt good to send some dude in a strange hat cartwheeling across the street. the sounds and visuals made almost everything feel good. really cool entry, cant wait to see what you all get up to in the next jam ;)

Nice mood, the color palette was amazing, and the fighting animations are excelent. Nice work!

Damn!! The art is awesome. The gameplay is also great. The beat em up polish is good. Would have loved a bit more variety during combat though. This is still very impressive thing to do in 3 days.
Great work dude! I guess its made in unreal, want to see how you made the blueprints for the combat mechanic. Its very smooth. :)

i'm really in love with the art here <3

@mukult Thanks! It was indeed made in UE4, usually I work in C++ but I gave pure blueprints a shot this time. The project is on github, please feel free to check it out. Any critique is more than welcome 😊

https://github.com/Almax27/LD43-Sacrifices-Must-Be-Made

I love the starting backdrop, wallpaper worthy! Looks and plays beautifully. Very fun, only criticism would be lack of variety in terms of input, pretty much 1-2-kicking everything is fun and all but it felt like there was little strategy/risk-reward in how to approach fights.

Great fighting mechanics and the graphics and lighting blend incredibly well! You should add some downloadable wallpapers!

Great gameplay, graphics and animations! Simple controls with lots of fighting. It was not that difficult to fight against only 1 enemy ... but when you are fighting against 2 or 3 it becomes a real problem. I died 4 times in the last battle and that is a good thing :P

Very well done!

Wow, the visuals in this are terrific, particularly in the opening scene. The gameplay's well executed, and extremely polished for how little time this was made in. I never made it past the "still no checkpoint?" section, but I liked how it'd started subverting my expectations.

One suggestion, by the way, as someone who also makes Unreal games - it's a good idea to go to your project's plugin settings and disable the various VR plugins, so that people who have headsets connected don't have them automatically start up when your game starts. It doesn't break the game or anything to not disable them, but doing so can save your players some hassle.

Anyway - nice work!

The environment and lighting were amazing and the audio suited it extremely well. The combat was basic but that is completely understandable and it was enjoyable regardless. Really liked the game overall!

@mahalis Thanks for the VR tip! I don't own a headset so didn't realise that was an issue, I'll add it to my check list for the next jam! :smile:

This is a super beautiful and very well made fighting game. The fighting mechanic feels really good, but the outcome of the fights felt a bit random. Overall a really good LD game.

For sure the game is pretty to look at, the animations are fluid and the combat responsive. I like the story progression and the length of the game itself is nice. For me, the theme is not really represented at all but that does not take away from the experience itself. After the first checkpoint I decide to see if I can just walk all the way to the end and avoid everyone...turns out I can! lol Not necessarily a bad thing since I became more interested in the story itself. lol I even started to come up with my own interpretation in that the main character has an eating problem and he was fighting his food temptations and sacrificing his tastes buds so that he would not go down the dark dark path he was in before when his life was all about eating. Sort of piece that together simply based on the game being centered around a Japanese man walking around food establishments and the final boss' name being Fruit Cake...lol (sorry if I butchered your story, just having fun with it :D)

@prodigalson I wish I could like your comment more than once! We did have a serious plot planned following Disc-0 sacrificing his honour by killing his cyber gangster family. But we ran out of time to do it justice and instead went for something silly and abstract. I'm delighted you were able to project your own story on to our game. Thanks for playing!

Street of Rage + Synth/RetroWave + UE4 | Such a nice combination :smile:

My only piece of advice - to work a bit on the balance. This game becomes really hard as closer to the end.
Unfortunately wasn't able to beat it completely.

Still, a wonderful submission! Will be following you on GitHub ^__ ^



I succeeded to finish it. Really good looking and challenging. Also good punch sound and music. If I had to give a default, the game is a little too repetitive. It is also frustrating that there is no way to outplayed enemies, or may be I didn't find one. Still had fun, good job.

Nice A E S T H E T I C.
Cool motifs and character design as well.

Great color scheme, and audio.

I also appreciated the touch of a slight slow effect after clearing a set of enemies.

Pretty darn polished for a game jam game.

Very polished, I like the lighting and colour palette. The fighting is a bit repetitive, but at least its punchy for lack of a better word. Well done

Beautifully done! The visuals and music are top notch; the neo-noir cyberpunk look is rocking, and the music is a wonderful mix of hard retrowave synth, the likes that remind me of Mega Drive!

The hitstun on impact makes the combat visceral and heavy; the animations are well done, if just a slight bit stiff, though the hitstun and meaty strike sfx go a long way to selling each punch and kick. I'm glad you opted to only allow 2 enemies to engage at a time; the protagonist is a tough nut, but his lack of any evasive maneuvers, instant knockdowns, aoe attacks, or guard abilities make him particularly vulnerable to multiple baddies.

Even so, it can be tough to fight even two enemies at once due to the inability to stagger their approaches; kiting and baiting an enemy attack or quickly knocking one down to allow time to approach the other does work to some degree, but even then I found them often shoulder-to-shoulder, ready to interrupt my attack should I choose to engage. Without changing very much, I suspect increasing the time enemies spent downed or increasing the time enemies spend in the wind-down animation after a whiffed punch would probably make the experience much more tactical and approachable.

That said, the combat is still a blast, and I enjoyed the inner dialogue! Bill and Ted are tough cookies, and I imagine I'd have been more upset having died after beating them, but the "No Checkpoint?!" comment made me laugh enough to want to power through to the end!

All in all, great work!

The game looks quite polished, animations are smooth and clean.

The style is enjoyable, yet I had some performance problems - which make the game almost unplayable due to very low fps (although note that I was playing this on my work laptop which has just intel gpu - which will be the reason of poor performance).

Good job!

Wow, this is really cool) very stylized, you did a good job on graphics, the track is very good, was it written specifically for this game? I liked the gameplay, but the enemies sometimes stupid and maybe with a block of attacks it would have looked better, in any case, you have done great work, guys!

@syrok yes, all music was made during the Jam by the wonderfully talented @dale-smith, who also did the music for our LD41 entry "Jeff From Accounting" :smile:

Such a great game. Finished it even if the end part was harsh but brutally beautiful. Music too !
Also it feels addicting and well balanced for such a short time.
Well done on that :)

Great game! loved the fluidity of it, the 3 hit animation and level progression. Not to mention the great artstyle and music / SFX. Only thing thats missing imo is another attack sequence, or maybe a power up hit? Feels polished for LD game, nice job!

The game plays very smoothly! It looks really great, the atmosphere is cool!

Wow, amazing. The music and the visuals blend so well together. The music is amazing, the lighting is amazing, the camera angles are so cinematic. Probably one of the best LD games! The perfect atmosphere/mood.
I am not 100% sure how it relates to the theme though.

Guys you're just great.
I don't think i've seen another fighting game this LD.
Your game is so beautiful and neat. Especially knowing that you had only 72 hours to do that.
I wonder what you can do if you continue developing it.
10 Chuck Norris out of 10 :)

Neat cyberpunk aesthetic for a good gameplay. Really smooth. Impressive work ++

Really great polish and music. Amazed at how much could be achieved in 3 days, really professional looking! Didn't really feel the theme coming through but otherwise great beat'em up!

Thank you for sharing your game with me. I played it on my stream tonight at https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames

I have rated your game, but all of my feedback was captured in the stream.

You can hear my comments in the archive at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/350134388 ("Walkthrough" at end of video) and https://www.twitch.tv/videos/350164861 (After restarted stream)

Wow... This was great fun.

Usually when I see an Unreal game I have my expectations low - usually people don't bother with postprocessing effects in Jam format (and just crank everything to 11) which results in hellish motion blur, glare all over the shop and so on...

In this case - maybe those things were still there, but camera being fixed position for most of the game, makes motion blur irrelevant, and glares if they were theye fit the overall style brilliantly.

Game mechanics are simple enough once you figure out AI patterns, and rhisms to keep enemies on the ground so they don't fight back, but having 3 encounters between checkpoints was intence still. Though "final boss" compared to this gauntlet was a cacewalk... so maybe crank it up a bit. Like make the AI adjusment to allow all 3 enemies to engage at once, rather than limiting active participants to two... (though this is just a guess, maybe 3 active enemies will result in stunlock for the player...)

Models and animations are simplistic, but quite well done for the Jam format. The only thing I would have changes is for the killed enemies switch to ragdoll only once theit body hits the ground. Havinf ragdoll kick in on hte killing blow results in some hilarious but unnatural positions...

The Mood of sleep deprivation is conveyed pretty well with this slightly surreal environment...

Overall - brilliantly done game!

Well as you said you did not implement the theme at all so I did not rate you on this but the rest of the game looked and sounded amazing. Love the simplistic style but you should probabaly add different fight actions. please annotate me if you ever plan to release this.

This was amazing!
Starting out I didn't have too high of expectations, it looked beautiful but I didn't expect more than that. Once I got into the city I was totally amazed. The level design was amazing, and the story was great.
I really enjoyed the music and atmosphere this game gave off as well.

As I was playing I was thinking that I was going to say how the bosses were pretty easy to beat, then I ran into Bill and Ted.....that was hard but still doable. One of my problems was that sometimes the path wasn't very clear. I had already died walking down an alleyway, so when I beat Bill and Ted I was nervous about which way to go.

All in all I really liked this, I was amazed by this game and thought it was so well done!

I love the cyberpunk aesthetic, especially the rippling cube "river"! I found the combat satisfying and the animations are excellent! The level design was consistently challenging without ever being too hard (although I did cheese the last encounter by luring them one at a time). The controller support felt very natural.

I would have liked a bit more strategic depth in the encounters, maybe a block or some way to handle multiple enemies easier. Overall though, it felt remarkably complete for only 72 hours! Excellent work!

This is definitely my favourite entry that I've played in this LD. This is my 12th time doing this, and I don't think I've ever played an entry that was *this* aesthetically appealing! I absolutely loved everything about it.

The gameplay was super tight. Much prefer using a controller, movement felt way more natural with it. Fighting people felt really satisfying, and though it would have been great to have more moves to work with, like a block or dodge, or for the AI to be a little dumber in a way that lets me be more tactical, even the three I had felt great to use, especially when an encounter was ended with that lovely slow mo finish! :punch:

The balancing spike was quite alarming, mostly because going from one checkpoint per encounter to the sudden boss followed by two encounters without one. I laughed and cried when I saw that message, initially I was surviving Bill and Ted with only 1 or 2 health! But the dark souls player within me persevered and it felt great to get my health back after (though%LS

This is definitely my favourite entry that I've played in this LD. This is my 12th time doing this, and I don't think I've ever played an entry that was *this* aesthetically appealing! I absolutely loved everything about it.

The gameplay was super tight. Much prefer using a controller, movement felt way more natural with it. Fighting people felt really satisfying, and though it would have been great to have more moves to work with, like a block or dodge, even the three I had felt great to use, especially when an encounter was ended with that lovely slow mo finish! :punch:

The balancing spike was quite alarming, mostly because going from one checkpoint per encounter to the sudden boss followed by two encounters without one. I laughed and cried when I saw that message, initially I was surviving Bill and Ted with only 1 or 2 health! But the dark souls player within me persevered and it felt great to get my health back after (though I did have to kite the last guys there haha). I actually then was able face the bossLS

EDIT: You guys made Jeff From Accounting! I knew that was a reference! Of course you guys made another amazing game. Incredibilis!

Wow, very well done! The animations were really tight, the graphics were perfectly retro, the music and sfx complimented the gameplay and mood very well. The camera angles gave the game a cinematic touch, and made similar fights feel new and fresh. Incredible for 72 hours. The only thing I could have asked for would be some way of counter playing the bad guys other than leaving their aggro zone. But even then, by the end of the game I was figuring out how to fight multiple baddies at once. Also, thank you so much for checkpoints!!! If I had to start over every time I'm not sure I would have played to the end.

Incredible work. It was a pleasure to play your game.