The Citadel - JFPS

[WhiteShark]

I started playing this today. I'm not a classic FPS connosieur so it's difficult to make comparisons. I'm having fun. In no particular order, my observations:

• Everything but the environment is a 2d sprite, classic FPS style.
• Most enemies are anime girl cyborgs, though you can't usually tell until you blow them to bits.
• You can double jump from the very beginning.
• Sprinting makes you very fast and jump proportionately far.
• There are no hitscan weapons for you nor enemies.
• Difficulty is split across several different options and the game is quite challenging if you turn them all to hard.
• Optionally, weapons can have durability and the more it degrades the more likely they are to randomly jam, requiring an early reload.
• There's a hunger meter which also caps your functional max health (health gained above hunger threshold quickly degrades), so the game has a (pretty loose) hunger clock.
• Enemies react to sound.
• Headshots matter.

I tried to get a couple of my own screenshots before posting this thread but it's not easy to do that with my current keybindings and I'm about to go to bed, so they're kind of crap. Regardless:

► Show Spoiler

[wndrbr]

Anime

[WhiteShark]

Anime

Yes, that is a good representation of what you do to all of your anime foes in this game.

[Trithne]

You left out that all the enemies are cyborg anime girls with highly detailed corpse sprites in various levels of dismemberment. It might not be a guro game, but that guy has drawn his fair share of guro art.

Citadel is okay. Sometimes jank, gets visually drab and repetitive after a while, and it feels like it wants to be Blame! the FPS but misses the mark. I wouldn't get it at the listed standard price though.

[rusty_shackleford]

You left out that all the enemies are cyborg anime girls with highly detailed corpse sprites in various levels of dismemberment. It might not be a guro game, but that guy has drawn his fair share of guro art.

[WhiteShark]

You left out that all the enemies are cyborg anime girls with highly detailed corpse sprites in various levels of dismemberment.

• Most enemies are anime girl cyborgs, though you can't usually tell until you blow them to bits.

Anyway, I don't think the gore is any worse than other games in this genre. The only difference is that it's anime cyborg girls instead of demons or whatever.

gets visually drab and repetitive after a while

Not feeling this yet, but I'm still very early on.

feels like it wants to be Blame! the FPS but misses the mark

An excellent mark for which to aim, regardless.

[WhiteShark]

It might not be a guro game, but that guy has drawn his fair share of guro art.

Hi, this is doekuramori. I’m the creator of The Citadel. Thank you for playing and your feedback on the game. I will try in the future to make games with more variety and the feedback in mind.

However there is one thing that is absolutely wrong. I am not guro artist. This is not a guro fetish game. Lately there have been many comments accusing me of being a nasty person and attacking me.

This isn’t true. I am not guro artist, I don’t make guro works or doujin. My interests are Touhou, Lost in Abyss and biomechanism. I also very like dark themes and games that have dark themes and oppressive feeling. I hope you can see it now. Not guro.

I am interested in biomechanism, like how people will merge with machines in the future. And what kind of conception that will make, like Ghost In The Shell meets H.R. Giger. It’s strange aesthetic and I think creates interesting image. But it’s not guro.

The Citadel features gibbing and violence because I identified that as a big part of the aesthetic of classic retro shooter. Ultra violence. Because I draw anime style, I interpret that through the way I draw. It is not “fetish”.

It is inspired by those old games, and also newer games which are influence by that old style, like Shadow Warrior 2. I was quite interested by the gibbing and gore system in Shadow Warrior because it’s like how old brutality meets new technology that allows use of physics with gib system. Again, not because it is sexual.

I am proud of what I achieve with The Citadel game, even if it is not perfect, but now I receive many comments and mean messages after watching video from people accusing me of being a dangerous freak who only wants to hurt girls. It’s not my intention. Please understand.

EDIT: I glanced at his pixiv and saw zero guro and I also tried searching "doekuramori" and "guro" with Grabber and got zero hits, so please do not spread fake news.

[WhiteShark]

it feels like it wants to be Blame! the FPS

Forgot to mention, but actually, the first thing it reminded me of was Warhammer 40k. The protagonist and the enemies are all members of a female-only, fanatically religious cybernetic fighting force who frequently wear power armor, so the parallel to the Sisters of Battle is obvious. The red robed enemies that throw axes kind of look like tech priests. The enemies are said to be under the influence of the 'Sleeping God', which sounds similar to the enthroned Emperor (though I realize that if this were true, that would make the protagonist the heretic).

[WhiteShark]

Defeated the first Angel and now I'm in Act II. Finding I can do some serious sniping with the whale gun when enemies' limbs are just barely sticking out from behind cover. I've encountered two tanks so far and I had no success destroying either; not sure if they're indestructible or just have an incredible amount of health on hard. In both cases I ended up baiting an attack then running past. Just found a pilotable mech for the first time, so that's neat. Not sure if it has any special controls yet.

I like that you get some permanent upgrades as you go along. End of Act I rewarded me with the ability to grab ledges, so I assume future acts will give further capabilities. Guns also have some purchasable upgrades. I bought the extra ammo capacity upgrade for the meta magnum but I'm still not sure what the use case is for it other than to save ammo on my other guns.

Enemies near-directly above and below you seem to have trouble figuring out what to do. I've found spots a couple times where I can fire a shot to lure enemies by sound to a particular spot and then pick them off while they remain unable to fire back due to the angle. It's possible to go very fast in this game and I imagine speedruns are fun to watch, but since I don't know the levels and enemies are deadly, I tend to play very conservatively.

I'm still getting used to the controls, but that's mainly because of my unique setup. I'm using my drawing tablet rather than a mouse for aiming, which works very well, but it also means I have fewer buttons available to my right hand. To compensate, I've moved my left hand controls two keys to the right, from WASD to RDFG, and rebound several different functions to the extra keys now available to my left pinky. Honestly I wish I could move the fire button itself off the tablet pen and onto the keyboard so as to prevent my aim going off when I hit the button, but I don't see how I can feasibly assign any more actions to my left hand.

[WhiteShark]

Third boss fight was pretty lackluster. Just another big blob who shoots a lot of blue blobs. It was made trivial by the respawn station (I had lives to spare) right outside the boss room, and even moreso by the fact that you can stand beyond the threshold and use it for cover. I forgave the first two bosses for being relatively simple but now I'm beginning to get worried.

Mechs are really fun. Having the jetpack feels really nice. I discovered the stomp damage on accident falling on a group of enemies and I laughed out loud when they all exploded.

Getting more used to the controls. I even managed to use medkits while actively fighting. Protip: if you run into a weapon that you don't automatically pick up, you have to manually grab it with the 'use' key. These are special strong weapons that prevent weapon switching while you have them and don't use normal ammo, so when you run out they are discarded. I was really confused when I first encountered a blue gun and my character refused to pick it up until I looked that up on the steam forums.

[cpmartins]

Anime

Isn't your avatar from a game that tried really hard to copy every single trope from JRPGs? Yes it is indeed.
HoW IrOnIc!

[Tweed]

Looks like shit.

[Dead]

Third boss fight was pretty lackluster. Just another big blob who shoots a lot of blue blobs. It was made trivial by the respawn station (I had lives to spare) right outside the boss room, and even moreso by the fact that you can stand beyond the threshold and use it for cover. I forgave the first two bosses for being relatively simple but now I'm beginning to get worried.

Mechs are really fun. Having the jetpack feels really nice. I discovered the stomp damage on accident falling on a group of enemies and I laughed out loud when they all exploded.

Getting more used to the controls. I even managed to use medkits while actively fighting. Protip: if you run into a weapon that you don't automatically pick up, you have to manually grab it with the 'use' key. These are special strong weapons that prevent weapon switching while you have them and don't use normal ammo, so when you run out they are discarded. I was really confused when I first encountered a blue gun and my character refused to pick it up until I looked that up on the steam forums.

lmaoing at her tears

[WhiteShark]

Just beat the fifth boss. Didn't even realize the stage was a boss level so I was very surprised when she droped out of the sky into this little room. Fortunately for me she had no minions to back her up, so I was able to mow her down with the chaingun while dodging her blue blobs on the first try.


Fourth boss was much harder since you first had to beat an aircraft thing and then you drop into the actual boss fight and she has at least a dozen minions with rifles. Took off my helmet to honor the fallen.


Meant to record that fight but I forgot. Whoops.

I think the AI is one of the weaker points of the game, unfortunately. For one, they won't detect you by sight unless your body is exposed, meaning you can lean around corners and safely pick off enemies without them noticing you. Yeah, they'll respond if you hit them and they survive, but that shouldn't happen if you're aiming at the head and your gun doesn't randomly jam. It also gets stuck inside corners sometimes, so I died once """ambushed""" by an enemy that was aware of me but was sitting in a corner because it couldn't figure out how to get out of the building it was in.

Still having good fun. Two more acts to go, if the game isn't lying to me.

[Dead]

The anime style works unexpectedly well with this kind of FPS game. Doesn't the environment get repetitive?

[WhiteShark]

The anime style works unexpectedly well with this kind of FPS game.

Most agreed. I'm actually surprised I haven't seen it done before. 2D FPS sprites + anime seems a natural combination in retrospect.

Doesn't the environment get repetitive?

It never bothered me. I found it atmospheric and the level structures are quite varied. Buildings all have the same style of textures generally but there's occasionally some other terrain.

Finished the game just now. Spoilery ending remarks:

► Show Spoiler

Act VII is just the final Angel and then the Sleeping God, the latter of which is just a story scene, essentially. It's a giant fetus and you blow it up with a bomb and the game ends in a black screen. A bit anticlimactic. I think it fit the atmosphere of the game but I'd still rather there had been one last fight. Apparently you can choose to not kill it by just jumping off the platform and dying and the game ends anyway. Forgot to screenshot it but it would have been spoilers anyway so whatever. At least the preceding Angel level was alright, even though it too was not technically a boss fight, just a hard level.

Also, apparently the dev revealed some stuff about the setting in an interview:

Those aren't all Waifus you're shooting. [SPOILERS]
A bit of info:

Doekuramori stated in an interview that the baddies are inspired by the Eloi from The Time Machine by HG Wells. They're devolved humans that are so weak they can't live without cybernetics and have lost their sexual dimorphism. Some are actually men. You are a proper, ancient human that has been cryogenically frozen.

The angels are actually demons who altered their appearance, and the world has stopped spinning, causing a massive citadel to be built in the night zone. God has long forsaken humanity and the demons tried to make their own God but it went wrong.

So the Waifus are actually cyber-eloi who are weak and devolved, and are not all Waifus.

Had fun. Wide variety of guns that feel good to use, good art, great atmosphere, decent music, challenging gameplay. I think the biggest weak points were enemy variety (on second thought, it has more enemy types than Doom, so I'm not sure what the standard is for the genre), boss fights (they all felt pretty similar), and AI. Would recommend.

I read somebody on the Steam forum claiming to have cleared the game on hard only using guns on the Angels by just sprinting around and kicking things. I have no idea how that's possible but I'm glad to hear it is because it means the ability to ~go fast~ is not without use. I only skipped through segments with speed a couple times and even then I would end up clearing the whole level anyway once I had secured a safe position to which I could retreat.

I feel not incorporating more platforming was a missed opportunity. The game has a double jump and a very fast sprint so it could have easily had some hardcore platforming segments, but you're never really required to do much more than hop between two platforms at moderate distance.

There's a New Game Plus option which lets you keep your upgrades. It seems I missed a couple secret levels, but I don't know how substantial they are. I'm not much for replaying games, so I think I'll let it be for now. Maybe someday I'll come back and try to be speedy instead of cautious.