It’s cute and enjoyable, but I didn’t really find its attempts at humor very funny…and this bogs it down quite a bit with how much it bases itself off that.

It's charming. I'm not sure if its Vesuvius's best work though. As many have pointed out, there's a lot of dead time between enemies and attacks. The game was originally going to be even more straightforward until I helped collaborate on the project by making some concepts and convincing Vesuvius to make it more brainrotted. Yes, the brainrot was caused by me. I feel like every level I touch ends up with a brainrot curse.

I'm really fond of the old arcade spaceship shoot-em-up games like Space Invaders, and Phalcron largely delivers on a similar concept. The gameplay is faithful, with the player being able to move around a 2-D space in a bullet hell environment fending off waves of enemies. It makes for an engaging and generally fun gameplay loop that requires the player to work pretty hard to survive, but the issue is it just goes on for 30 minutes straight with next to no notable changes aside from a few mini-bosses. It ultimately becomes really monotonous, which is unfortunate because the base gameplay does work well and I'd really have no issues with it if it were shorter or included some elements of variation like upgrade systems, diverse enemy types or unique environmental hazards to break up the main gameplay loop.

The decoration is pretty solid overall, with all of the background environments being clean and simple enough to keep a good level of contrast with the gameplay. I particularly like the snowy and lava areas, as they stand out from everything else and have solid effect work with elements like the snow falling and floating embers. It is very reminiscent of a more modern version of an old arcade game in a lot of aspects, but not something I'd typically expect from a spaceship shooter as you'd normally expect it to take place in space, so the two being combined into one level feels a bit odd to me. Most of the actual spaceship designs also look oddly muddy due to the glow usage rather than shiny or metallic, which could be remedied with less "smudged" looking glow.

It's nice seeing someone as talented in the editor as GDvesuvius take a crack at reimagining an old arcade-styled game, and Phalcron is overall good and has a very good base concept that it iterates on. However, the length, lack of variation and odd choice of backgrounds mean I would recommend it for Feature.